Cheating is meant to subvert the grading process itself. When it is detected, the proper penalty involves canceling academic credit.

The Ministry of Education on Monday issued amended rules concerning punishments for cheating on national exams in response to a growing trend of using technology to cheat on the tests.

The idea is that when exams measure performance through analysis of information, the ability to find facts is not that helpful.

A top-performing Wake County high school has been caught up in a cheating scandal involving some of its highest-scoring students. Wake County school officials said Thursday that five juniors at Panther Creek High School were implicated in up to three incidents of cheating, including distributing copies of an exam. School administrators did not identify what type of test was involved.

An accusation that Highland Elementary School cheated on standardized tests has left Principal Scott Steffan and his staff outraged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article Sunday that said Silver Spring school likely cheated on its standardized tests because its scores increased so significantly from 2007 to 2009. But there is not one shred of evidence that the students at the school did not earn their test scores, Steffan said.

Hundreds of photos of standardized tests have begun to appear on social-networking sites in California, raising concerns about test security and cheating by students. In the worst-case scenario, the photos could lead to invalidating test scores for entire schools or prevent the state from using certain tests.

The parents of a sophomore at Sequoia High School in Redwood City have sued the district for kicking the student out of an honors English class last month for copying a classmate’s homework. The sophomore had signed an “Academic Honesty Pledge” at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year that declares cheating is grounds for immediate removal from the advanced-level program; his mother also had signed it.

A judge on Tuesday dismissed a Gautier man’s case against the Pascagoula School District over his son’s seized cell phone. Mark Miller’s son attends Gautier High School. Miller argued the school should have returned the phone to him after it was confiscated. But the superintendent said “no,” because the student violated district policy.

On April 23, ACT and Advanced Placement test materials were discovered missing from what was described as a “very secure area” within the school, Cherry Creek School District spokeswoman Tustin Amole said.

This story describes one teacher’s experience where his supervisors suggested that students should be given hints during the exam.