Acknowledging that New York lags behind the best practices for detecting and deterring cheating by educators on high-stakes standardized tests, a Board of Regents committee on Monday authorized an independent investigator to look at how the State Education Department handles complaints of cheating.

But several experts on testing said New York still had a long way to go to be in line with what leading states are doing to prevent educators from tampering with tests. Additional improvements, including some items recommended last week by a state panel, like centralizing scoring in one place and conducting analyses of results, would help, but some local officials worry they could be prohibitively expensive.

“The steps they are suggesting are nothing out of the ordinary,” Gregory Cizek, a test security expert from the University of North Carolina, said of the panel’s recommendations. “They would pretty much get them in line with the ordinary.” He added that New York’s current test-security practices put it “near the bottom” of states nationally.

The Regents on Monday began the process of addressing that, giving state officials approval to explore an additional series of steps that would put the state in control of scoring, a significant shift from the localized systems now in place, which appears to be unique among states.

Scoring all the tests in one place, education officials said, would allow the state to do systemwide checks for cheating, like detecting suspicious patterns of erasures or sudden leaps in scores. For essay questions, state officials will explore a relatively new technology called distributive scoring, in which answer sheets are scanned and uploaded onto computers, and graded by other educators across the state.

“We administer six million assessments a year,” said John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner. “That’s a lot of tests, and that creates a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong.”

The heightened emphasis on test security comes after a spate of cheating scandals, in Atlanta, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Washington. In June, the federal education secretary, Arne Duncan, sent a letter to all state education commissioners urging them to make “assessment security a high priority” by considering additional steps like more monitoring on testing day.

On Monday, the Regents also gave the go-ahead for the state to consider banning teachers from grading or proctoring their own students’ exams, though several members expressed concern that younger students might get too nervous with an unfamiliar adult showing up on test day.

READ MORE: NY TIMES