The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release October 17, 2016 FACT SHEET: President Obama Announces High School Graduation Rate Has Reached New High Today, President Obama will travel to Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Washington, D.C. to announce that America’s high school graduation rate has reached a record new high of 83.2 percent. The high school graduation rate has risen steadily over President Obama’s time in office, growing by about four percentage points since the 2010-2011 school year — the first year all states used a consistent, four-year adjusted measure of high school completion.

From just before the election:Particularly amazing was the performance of Alabama. According to the White House , Alabama vaulted from a 72% high school graduation rate in 2011 to 89.3% in 2015, the third highest in the country behind Iowa and New Jersey.

How did Alabama do it?

By cheating.

From NPR:

Alabama Admits Its High School Graduation Rate Was Inflated December 19, 2016 11:30 AM ET Heard on All Things Considered by Dan Carsen

Here’s a 2015 NPR report on various tricks states can play to inflate their graduation rates.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s not just administrators playing games. Students can increasingly game the system as more of schooling goes online. You don’t have to be some KGB genius to hack some of today’s educational software systems. There are a lot of work-arounds immediately available via Google. For example, students can crowdsource assignments by copying and pasting in constantly reused questions along with the multiple choice answer possibilities and looking for the answer with the most votes.

And today’s young people don’t necessarily see the point of following the spirit of the rules. I particularly enjoy this young entrepreneur’s justification for your using his trick to dupe your teacher into helping you score misleadingly high on online pretests so you don’t have to waste your time studying the lessons just because you don’t know the material:

So that’s one of the things I most don’t like … is that the teachers won’t help you with the pretests, mainly because of reasons like “You need to know this stuff …”