In China, the SAT is only administered at international schools, and that’s where some of the most pervasive cheating has taken place, so I don’t think it’s that.
@sattut, “The CB does recycle exams domestically. The snow makeup exam for the last old SAT was exactly the December 2013 exam. This test was available online. I can’t mention where on this site. Many students not intending to cheat took it as a practice test and had a big advantage.”
This makes me furious–not your post, but the fact that they recycled a test that others knew about from a test that ‘was available online’ in a site you ‘can’t mention.’
So what you mean is that some people have access to old tests that others don’t–it’s not a legitimate source, or you would have said, “This is an old test that was published.”
I am so sickened by the way CB caters to the wealthy and cheaters, then acts astonished when the wealthy cheaters find ways to cheat. The “evil Asian cartels” is an obvious spin on CB’s own incompetence, but to read that tests here are also recycled, really upsets me. I’m a private tutor and I teach my students to do better based on their own hard work. I have no idea where these cheating sites are online, but I’m sure expensive tutoring companies do. It deeply upsets me that CB won’t fix this issue–I’m quite certain it’s also because it suits the interests of the very wealthy, who can afford to pay for expensive cheaters.
According to this article, test questions are never kept online.
http://time.com/3551112/sat-cheating-scandal-china-college-board/
The SAT is never uploaded to the Internet. Test questions are never emailed. And even the computers that test creators use to write and edit the questions are never, ever connected to the web.
“The idea is that you can’t hack something that isn’t there,” said Ray Nicosia, the director of the Office of Testing Integrity at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which oversees the security of the College Board’s SAT and SAT II subject area tests. Every year, those tests are administered at 25,000 test centers in 192 countries around the world.
It is a well-known practice that dates back decades for ETS to recycle questions from a question bank for nearly every single test it oversees or administers, including the SAT, TOEFL iBT, TOEIC, and yes, even the APs, both for domestic and international administrations of the Advanced Placement exams.
https://professionals.collegeboard.org/testing/ap/coordinate/security
“Some multiple-choice questions are reused to ensure that exams are reasonably equivalent in difficulty from one year to the next.”
Do they print out questions? Have they locked down the passwords on their printers and the commercial printers they use? Have they disabled all extraneous functionality on the computers and printers used to write the tests?
Sure, they believe they haven’t been hacked. However, Reuters is reporting test that were never given anywhere have been compromised. I believe it’s more likely their databases have been hacked than that employees have been bribed. (I’m probably naive.) If employees were bribed, then the searches upon leaving and entering their place of employment were not adequate. By the way, thumb drives and cameras are tiny these days. http://freeenergy.news/steorn/steorns-offices-bugged/. The tests may not be on the internet, but they do exist in some databank; multiple employees must have access. As the tests have allegedly been compromised, the security was not adequate.
In fact, I rather think the article is something of a rear-guard action attempting to forestall pressure to move to a computer-delivered exam. Such an exam could be delivered at test centers run by trained personnel. (Not school personnel who have “gone though an ETS training.”)
While everything you are suggesting is certainly plausible, I personally find it a bit far-fetched that there is some greater hitherto undisclosed conspiracy in which Chinese (or anyone of any ethnicity) hackers are decrypting passwords on commercial printers to secretly extract SAT exams that have never before even been given. LOL! Of course, “I’m probably naive,” and who can really distinguish fact from fiction in a world where people still believe Martians inhabit the Earth and that the Italian Mafia was behind the assassination of JFK?
For now, I say let’s stick to what we do know as fact. The College Board regularly recycles its exams internationally, a fact which has contributed in many more ways to widespread cheating in Asia than the infiltration of unsecured computers or printers within the confines of ETS headquarters.
I would guess it’s more that CB doesn’t want to spend the money it would take to make enough questions to never recycle anything.
Couldn’t this hacking be done by 1 person? Once 1 person gets access and posts it somewhere online then it can spread pretty easily around the internet without needing some sort of high tech cabal running the show…I think we just gave NBC the plot-line for it’s next episode of “The Blacklist”
The whole issue of facilitating cheating is rampant at many colleges. I’d be a billionaire if I had a nickel for every time an instructor is too lazy to make a new exam for every single semester.
I spend many hours making exams, and cross-checking them versus previous semesters, and I know instructors who just reuse exams. And what happens is identical to what is happening here - the haves get access to old graded exams and have a huge advantage, and the have nots have to do it the old-fashioned way.
If I were the CB, I would make many many red herring exams available, and only a few “real ones” available in the mix. They can even trace them to see where any leaks are coming from.
As for after the fact exams being sold/published, all you need is a complicit proctor and bingo.
What is the solution to all of this?
Mandate entrance exams for any college that weighs standardized test scores heavily. Also make sure to mandate an English language entrance exam for any student who has non-US citizenship. There are graduate students in my department who would not understand if someone yelled “Fire!” unless it was in their native language, but on paper they are superstars and highly proficient in English.
I take it your school does not make old exams accessible to all, both to equalize the use of them as study aids and to deter instructors from recycling exams? (Also useful for students with AP credit who want to check whether they really should skip the course that they are allowed to skip.)
Lets stop accepting Asian students in US schools until it is possible to verify the validity of the test scores and the tests taken by the students. Short of that and it schools are doing a disservice to American students and Asian student are ruining the educational system.
@lostaccount ur not talking about Asian-Americans right?
Perhaps the idea is not as far-fetched as I had assumed. Given the fact that an advance copy of the SAT could easily net one profits of more than $100,000 simply by advertising such an exam on a Chinese website, one can certainly see that there is plenty of monetary incentive for members of these Asian cartels to cheat by any and all means.
And what happens if and when the recycling practices of the College Board do, in fact, cease? Does all the widespread cheating really stop? What happens when the Chinese cartels resort to outright theft by hijacking shipments of tests being delivered to Asia or bribe test center supervisors in South America or Afghanistan, where test security is most certainly not as stringent?
As suggested by another poster, perhaps it is time for the colleges to shoulder some responsibility as well and implement better ways to screen applicants with inflated standardized test scores but horrendous verbal abilities in English. Or perhaps, as mentioned in another post, ETS could actually create some sort of “red herring” exams and allow them to be mass distributed in Asia to discredit the cheaters and the cartels.
My honest feeling, however, is that the College Board will simply revert to its old practices of recycling exams in Asia once all the fury dies down. As juicy as these investigative reports have been, I don’t see CNN or any other major media outlet reporting on these scandals. In the end, who really cares about a bunch of Asian geeks cheating on some standardized test, especially when the parents of these geeks contribute billions of dollars to the ailing U.S. economy? Sigh.
@yoyohi ur not talking about Asian-Americans right?
Good question.
The question of whether the widespread cheating in Asia is restricted only to those of Asian descent residing in Asian countries, such as China or Korea, or whether Asian-Americans living in and attending schools in America are also involved is one that has never really been brought up before, until recently when the Reuters article touched upon the idea of “mobility cheating” and the Education Realist, a self-proclaimed expert on Asian cheating whose blogs seem to contain a lot of misinformation on many aspects of this subject, mentioned something about Sanli (some Chinese academy) students who were “debriefed” after taking the March exam in the U.S.
The fact is that just as many Asian-American students attending schools in the U.S. cheat on the SAT and other standardized tests in the same way that their Chinese or Korean counterparts in Asia cheat. The idea is simple: the cartels simply persuade the parents of such students to fly their kids out to other countries near the U.S. and many, in fact, do. Moreover, many Asian kids in the U.S. have spring or summer breaks in which they fly back to their countries of origin and opt to take the international version of the exam, not always to cheat, but simply because it is more convenient to do so. (Of course, many might see this as a hasty generalization, and one must understand that there many more Asian students both domestically and abroad who do not cheat than there are that do, so take of this what you will.)
Hence, although those of Chinese residence cannot take the SAT in mainland China, although new rules were implemented to restrict the number of times Korean students can take the exam in Korea, although Asian students in the U.S. don’t seem to cheat as much as their Asian counterparts abroad, the new range of mobility and technological prowess that the cheater can employ has done absolutely nothing to stop what is now known as “mobility cheating.”
If there is a will, there is a way.
There is no summer SAT, and the March test is only offered in the US.
There are many ways, but the biggest way is that the CB recycles tests, even ones it knows have been leaked or accurately reconstructed. If the CB stopped recycling tests (and it has the resources to do so!) and released every exam, the easiest, most pernicious form of cheating would be rendered impossible.
Cheaters are in the wrong and deserve punishment–they ruin it for the vast majority of hard-working, honest kids–but the CB’s role in this crisis is non-trivial and enabling, and the CB has done its best to avoid responsibility while raking in tax-free profits. It’s time for it to stop.
In 2017 SAT is offering an August administration.
Yes, you are correct that the March test is only offered in the US. I should have said summer or winter breaks, because there is, in fact, a “summer SAT” internationally (the June administration), depending on your interpretation of what months summer constitutes, but there are many Asian kids in the U.S. whose semesters end in the beginning/middle of June who fly back to Korea to take the June SAT and to cheat.
If the College Board used only new tests in Asia, and later recycled them in the US, there would be less cheating in Asia (since the cheaters would have to crack the College Board before the tests are used instead of gathering information on tests given in the US). But there would be more cheating in the US.
Of course, they do not do it this way, because then there would be much more pressure for them to stop recycling tests and increase test security. As it is now, they can let racial prejudice carry the “Asians are cheaters” narrative to deflect blame from their own lax practices that make it easier for cheaters.
@-) @-) @-) @-) @-) @-) @-) @-) @-) @-) @-) @-)
I wonder if Eshagoff is a Chinese or Korean name: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/education/on-long-island-sat-cheating-was-hardly-a-secret.html
Actually, the June SAT-1 is offered in Korea only at international schools, which are closed test centers, so what you’re describing is impossible.
US schools’ winter breaks do not include the January test date, which is near the end of the month.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.
“Actually, the June SAT-1 is offered in Korea only at international schools, which are closed test centers, so what you’re describing is impossible.”
Um. Past June SAT I administrations are/were available to all individuals in Korea, and the restrictions that you’re speaking of for the SAT I only applied in the months of November and January beginning in 2013. I find it weird that you insist otherwise when such information can easily be found on the College Board website, not to mention the fact that I’ve personally taken all SAT I exams in June in Korea for the past 2 years.
Available tests and test dates for the 2015-16 academic year: (Korea)
October: SAT only
November: No SAT offered on this date. SAT Subject Tests in Literature, Biology E/M, Chemistry, Physics, Math 1, Math 2, US History, World History and all Language with Listening Tests are offered. No reading-only language SAT Subject Tests will be offered on this date.
Note: You may not see the World History test as an option at registration, but you will have the ability to take it on test day.
December: SAT only
May: SAT only
June: SAT and SAT Subject Tests in Literature, Biology E/M, Chemistry, Physics, Math 1, Math 2, US History, World History, French, Spanish, German, Modern Hebrew, Latin and Italian. All language exams are reading only. No Language with Listening Tests will be offered on this date.
Now, this scenario would be the Chinese cartel’s quintessential wet dream – to start recycling tests in the U.S. that they first administer in Asia.