With the new emphasis on high-stakes testing, we need a new class of people. I'm not talking about members of the Testing Industrial Complex, manufacturing exams, grading exams, selling exam-based textbooks for test prep and such. I'm talking about the invigilators--the anti-cheating police (and no I did not make up that word).
The higher the stakes, the more important it becomes to have highly, qualified invigilators. They were so effective in Hubei Province in China that students rioted there, chanting, "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." Skilled invigilators have been known to uncover cell phones in underwear and even transmitters in erasers!
As long as the tests are also high stakes for teachers, the invigilators will need to monitor teachers just as closely. This may mean, in the most egregious situations, pat-downs and strip searches!
Since the work of invigilators is highly demanding, they need to be highly paid. More resources must be funneled away from classrooms to pay these elite invigilators with skills on par with the James Bonds of the past.
They may take some lessons from Kasetsart University in Thailand where students apparently all agreed that it was fun to wear cheaply fashioned blinders.
More lessons are to be learned from Thailand's Civil Aviation Center where boxes were all the rage.
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