<p>Xiggi, I think the article acts like a help-wanted ad because those students who CAN ace the test repeatedly (and who rarely if ever cheat because they have no need to) will look and ask themselves “HOW MUCH could I make for an afternoon of test taking?!!!” Compared to other unsavory to illegal ways of making cash for college, like finding an older “sugar daddy,” appearing in a porn flick, selling weed, or counting cards in a casino, this “opportunity” has a pretty nice risk-reward ratio.</p>
<p>The high schools don’t need to be “blackballed” and shouldn’t that is not fair to kids that don’t cheat of which I firmly believe their are plenty…the kids, however, from those schools need to feel the consequences of their actions. I feel sorry for everyone that this is in the legal system, we’ve tended to get pretty heavy handed with solving social problems with the legal system. It’s easily solved by not giving these kids the one thing they cheated to get. Easy.</p>
<p>CB needs to address this publicly and harshly or they’ll be the ones with legal “problems”. Their “fiefdom” days need to end. How many kids with legitimate scores got passed over for admission to top schools because they were displaced by cheaters?
Is it hundreds, thousands?</p>
<p>It is College Board/ETS that needs to be blackballed. We have ceded too much power to them for too long. Our love affair with tests could only lead to cheating.</p>
<p>Probably not all the many. Even a perfect SAT/ACT score is not a guarantee of admission. The kid who “buys” a test is not likely to also be at the head of the class, have leadership positions in multiple ECs and have won regional and national competitions. The few who can “buy” all the necessary elements can probably also buy the admissions experts to help tailor every aspect of their application – and THOSE few have ALWAYS been able to get in, one way or another.</p>
<p>Let us not forget about the teachers in Atlanta who falsified test results.</p>
<p>There, it was the teachers themselves who were cheating !!!.</p>
<p>And this may be before many of your times, but you may recall that Ted Kennedy was thrown out of college for having someone take a Spansih test for him. True story.</p>
<p>There are lots of problems with teachers cheating on test scores. When you tie test scores to jobs, what do you expect? Heck, superwoman herself - Michelle Rhee - got caught up in a cheating scandal. Cheating has always been and will always be. Some of us will feel better when the pound of flesh has been extracted, but little will change.</p>
<p>There’s a REALLY good novel based on this premise by a British writer. It’s called “May Contain Nuts” and the premise is that it’s actually a hypercompetitive MOM who takes her daughter’s placement tests for a spot at a good British private school - then she meets the poor girl who DID"T get the scholarship because of the cheating. Great novel . . .</p>
<p>It may not be many deserving kids cheated out of a spot by a cheater, but even one is too many. When performance starts being tied to numbers in any pursuit, academic, business, or whatever, people learn how to massage the numbers. The line between massaging, manipulating, and falsifying numbers blurs and such cheating becomes ubiquitous with all of the usual motives, preserving one’s own job, turf, moving up, etc. Of course, without tying performance to numbers, it becomes difficult to “hold people accountable.” The tyranny of numbers for accountability or efficiency requires the people being subject to that tyranny to meet the numbers one way or another in business, government, military, elections, school, you name it. A sufficient number of people to cry foul and actually play fair or corruption will rule the day - a more virulent form than currently rules.</p>
<p>By the way, I hope one of the posts above was being facetious about a student with borderline 700 scores being irretrievably stupid, or something to that effect. I suspect that some Tuft graduates are as successful, or more, than some of their counterparts at Harvard. I didn’t attend either, but the view expressed seemed a bit harsh.</p>
<p>I may be overly cynical, but it seems to me that if you de-emphasize standardized testing, the cheaters will just manipulate whatever you decide to emphasize. I suppose the fairest thing would just be to auction off spots in top schools to the highest bidder.</p>
<p>Bogney…yes, the post you are refering to is in jest.</p>
<p>LOL Hunt…that wound DEFINITELY be more fair and less competition (not). I cannot imagine how that auction would go! Sounds like a reality TV show in the making. It could be like that Japanese game show where contestants go through the absurd obstacle course and are physically abused to win. Goodness, what has this come to? Maybe to make ist more academic, it should be Jeopardy in style, instead of an obstacle course?? Or…</p>
<p>How about we just get mean and hold those responsible accountable? Four of the six kids who paid to get their tests taken are in college. Why are their names being protected? How likely is that they are minors? How about their high school? They just reprimanded the kids by taking their previlege away and a few days of suspension but allowed them to go to college with recommendations and all?</p>
<p>According to what the NYT published this morning, it was school officials that suspected and pursued the investigation. ETS cooperated at the school’s request but seems to be working overtime to sweep these things under the rug:</p>
<p>That actually defines my kid, whose all-honors curriculum in a tough academic environment (highly competitive, AP not allowed until senior year) has resulted in a number of 91 and 92 semester grades – “B” according to the school’s 7-point scale. Her high SAT score better reflects her capabilities.</p>
<p>Igloo, I think that the school that decided that level of punishment was appropriate should also have made more effort to “do the right thing”. The adults in this case are just as guilty of not disclosing the findings as the kids are of cheating.</p>
<p>The school misrepresented the kids in their college application. They lied. Great Neck High is a liar. Sorry to get inflammatory. Kids getting caught drinking or playing pranks and school choosing not to report to colleges is different. This SAT transgression is far more serious and the school chose to cover it up. Isn’t that why it continued to this year? They have no excuse.</p>
<p>Snowdog, I agree that test scores don’t always directly relate to a student’s gpa. More on the story today:
</a> The school didn’t start to investigate cheating just because the students were B or B- students who got the 97% SAT scores. I think they started because there were rumors of cheating and then they looked at which students took the tests out of their district. After that, they compared handwriting.</p>
<p>Another way to compare test scores is to see the pattern of other test scores. Based on previous standardized tests, one should have a sense of how well you’d do in the SAT.</p>
<p>I was thinking someone might distrust the high scores my kids got, especially because they only took the tests once, but then, they all again took their tests in their home school. Their test scores also always soared in our state tests too.</p>
<p>Its not the school that deserves disrespect. Other than the kids, its ETS. They are always slow to move on cheating. This issue of kids taking exam for others at different schools has been known for a long time. Easy fix. Anyone taking exam at different school has that noted on results, and has digital pix taken at exam. Issue of kids switching tests once they log in – does ETS check for not only unusually high scores but also low ones.</p>
<p>That may very well be. But it’s the school who validates students’ academic record in the school report, isn’t it? They knew the kids cheated on the academic matter. How do they not tell colleges in all honesty? Colleges rely on them to be credible in the information schools provide. Other innocent kids in the school need their school to be credible so that the recommendation they deserve to get carries weight.</p>