[samdk]

Did you read the article? The entire thing is about a school that for years did things like have teachers change test answers after the fact in order to increase their overall test scores. That's what I mean by gaming statistics.

edit: clearly I should have chosen a different word. I think you're all focusing on one specific word I used, and not on the actual argument I'm making, which is that if your model of assessment depends on a single Big Important Number, people will find ways to make that number what they need it to be.

[rmc]

That's outright cheating and fraud. Any test can be cheated if you look at the answers beforehand. "Gaming" means figuring out flaws in the way it's tested and then doing lots of that. In your lines-of-code-added metric, "gaming" means adding and removing lots of code. "cheating" means hacking the database with results and changing the values.

[yummyfajitas]

If "game" simply means "cheat", the solution is simple - third party test administration. I thought you meant they do something legal other than education to make the scores go up.

[twoodfin]

That's not gaming; it's cheating. No objective evaluation system could be immune to that.