In reality, on the front lines, a large number of inmates were found to be taking the path of least resistance when it came to tested programs. They would cheat. Amazingly, many spent more time figuring out a way to cheat their way through a program than it would have taken to just buckle down and study for the tests. There were many motivations for this. Some cheated because they thought it a waste of their time, they didn't have a problem, the problem belonged to everyone else. Others cheated because they could make money selling cheat sheets or answers to those who found it easier to pay a few sodas or candy bars than to study. No matter what the reason, inmate cheating emerged as a major problem when they were tested over any program material. This behavior proved consistent over the years.

  Valid testing, when applied to inmate populations translated into the necessity of designing a system which could not be defeated by the ubiquitous inmate cheat sheet and the many other nefarious schemes inmates could dream up to circumvent studying and learning programmed material.

  An analysis of the reasons that prisoners were able to so easily defeat traditional paper and pencil tested programs revealed that their success almost entirely depended on their ability to predict the position of questions and answers on any test administered. Such predictability was inherent with paper and pencil formats and permitted prisoners to develop cheat sheets that could easily concealed, copied onto a hand, leg, shirtsleeve or small scrap of paper and smuggled into a testing session. If the cheater were successful, copies of his cheat sheet would be given or sold to other prisoners in a geometrically increasing fashion. Stacks of paper and pencil tests laying around in counselor offices and the fact that paper and pencil tests existed in a form that could be easily stolen made the maintenance of program validity almost impossible within the prison environment.

  Everything that was attempted to keep inmates from cheating, stealing tests, passing them around or otherwise circumventing the intent that they actually learn programmed material met with miserable failure. Some prison counselors sat as monitors and actually watched inmates cheat their way through paper and pencil tests. When confronted with this behavior one of them replied, "Let them cheat. They are hurting noone but themselves." But they were. The prison was now fostering and condoning the very criminal behavior that these people were sent to prison for in the first place. Unfortunately, many of the inmates were sharper, or equally as sharp as the people hired as correctional counselors. This became apparent to me when one day the counselor supervisor for our complex went and got a copy of the movie, "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and broadcast it over closed circuit TV to the entire prison complex. When I found out about this, I made a bee line to his supervisors office. His supervisor, a dim whitted man with tatoos of large eagles on his back thought the behavior on the part of his subordinate odd, but saw nothing intrinsically wrong with it. The supervisor in question told him there was no intrinsic evidence that violent movies contributed to violent behavior. The inmates loved this guy.

  After years of trying different methods to keep programs valid and meeting abject failure. Counselors burnt out quickly when required to grade paper and pencil tests, even when given scoring keys. Hundreds of paper and pencil tests were generated and it was almost impossible to keep them all secure. They were stolen by inmates in large numbers with some inmates coming to testing sessions with the specific intention of stealing tests. There were the numerous counselors who didn't give a damn if inmates cheated their way through programs. The amount of staff time spent grading tests also became an issue as staff were always stretched and the prison was always understaffed. We were left with no other solution capable of addressing this severe problem other than the computerization of testing, scoring and record keeping for these large-scale programs. Construction of a software package that could accomplish these goals was begun more than a decade ago. From inception, the following features were planned.

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