<p>Macey, thanks for explaining the motive. I still can’t get over the stupidity of the scheme, though. Success required 90 students looking at their phones during the test and not getting caught?</p>
<p>^^^ I read somewhere – don’t remember where – that he even posted his exploits on facebook. So the principal didn’t catch him by chance, but was alerted by other students, and went looking for him.</p>
<p>ANOTHER FRAUD???</p>
<p>This Daily News article quotes Peter Galasinao as the new Stuyvesant Parent Association co-president:</p>
<p>[Cheating</a> scandal at elite Stuyvesant High School highlights double standard - NY Daily News](<a href=“Opinion - New York Daily News”>Cheating scandal at elite Stuyvesant High School highlights double standard)</p>
<p>His own LinkedIn says he has been co-president since 2011:</p>
<p>[Peter</a> Galasinao | LinkedIn](<a href=“http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/pub/peter-galasinao/7/621/634]Peter”>http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/pub/peter-galasinao/7/621/634)</p>
<p>Yet here are the real Parent Association 2011-2012 co-presidents (Wei Lam, Barbara Reiser):</p>
<p>[Parents</a>’ Association of Stuyvesant High School - EXECUTIVE BOARD](<a href=“http://stuy-pa.org/home/content/view/13/27/]Parents”>http://stuy-pa.org/home/content/view/13/27/)</p>
<p>So now people are pretending to be Stuyvesant Parent Association co-presidents in their LinkedIn??!?!?</p>
<p>Well, he’s listed on that page as being on the Board. Perhaps it’s out of date and he actually is a co-president.</p>
<p>Mystery solved: he’s a 2012-2013 Co-President.
<a href=“http://stuy-pa.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=182&Itemid=1&date=2012-05-01[/url]”>http://stuy-pa.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=182&Itemid=1&date=2012-05-01</a>
The Daily News probably just mucked up the details.</p>
<p>Thanks Hunt for tracking down the mystery. Actually, the Daily News was right …</p>
<p>His own LinkedIn page is wrong. He is the incoming co-president, but his LinkedIn says he has been there for 9 months, since October 2011.</p>
<p>So many weird things …</p>
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<p>Well, perhaps the school needs a bit more than ONE example to send a message that business as usual will not be tolerated. And, to be clear, the business as usual is nothing else than years of cheating on tests, plagiarism, collaborating when not permitted, obtaining years of past tests and exams, and other activities that are rarely if ever condemned by a faculty that has “good” reasons to look the other way. </p>
<p>The patterns of reported cheating are pretty clear to … anyone who cares to look at the origins and “causes” of the problems. Probably not too darn PC, but whoever has followed this type of stories has no problem identifying the perpetrators. </p>
<p>Winning at all cost! The ONLY problem for the pushers of such a system of organized deceit is … getting caught as the morals and ethics do not have any importance.</p>
<p>It probably said member of the Board before, and he just changed the heading to Co-President. Everyone is suspect, but not everyone is guilty.</p>
<p>^^^ Agree with you. Innocent until proven guilty is still the best policy.</p>
<p>If MOST of the student body believes that cheating and rule breaking is OK – and so do their parents – then I think I’d start looking into admissions fraud as well. Personally I think all the cheaters should be removed and they should be replaced with kids who were wait listed.</p>
<p>Like zoosermom stated, the Regents are not that hard, but one doesn’t want to tank them, either, and it’s not one test, but one for each and every subject you have ever taken, it seems; they are time consuming and something of a nuisance in terms of resource demand and going over things you’ve already seen over and over and over again. Someone took the optimization and peer-to-peer sharing motif a bit far.</p>
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<p>I don’t think it’s because they’re worried about tanking them. </p>
<p>Despite the fact the passing grade has increased slightly from my day, several HS classmates who are now current NYC teachers as well as my old teachers have all remarked that the current regents are much more watered down compared to the ones we took in the early-mid '90s because everyone’s now required to take them and the prevailing NCLB mentality within the Bloomberg-run education establishment. And the regents back then were already widely known among Specialized HS kids as a joke as demonstrated by my experience with the French regents vs grades in the French classes. </p>
<p>It’s a reason why a sizable chunk of the discussion on the alumni forums has been figurative “headdesks” and musings as to why specialized HS students would even bother cheating on the regents.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure anyone, at this school or any high school, is interested in looking into admissions fraud. The colleges, certainly the highly selective colleges, seem to reward the Machiavellian tactics of students (and their parents) that are revealed whenever something like this reaches the light of day. That is to say, they reward end results… the accomplished, polished, high achieving end product. Much like the College Board with last years very public cheating scandal, this high school is much more concerned with the “very public” than it is with the “cheating”. I would not hold my breath waiting for an inquisition into application fraud.</p>
<p>Update: serious consequences</p>
<p>[69</a> Stuyvesant High School students to retake Regents in wake of cheating incident - NY Daily News](<a href=“Education News - New York Daily News”>71 Stuyvesant High School students to retake Regents in wake of cheating incident)</p>
<p>It doesn’t clarify the facts much, except to say that the kid photographed “his” exam and then sent the answers. I guess everybody he sent it to has to retake, whether they looked at the answers or not. Maybe if they cleared their messages, you can’t tell if they looked.</p>
<p>Well, retake is not as harsh as things go – there’s almost an element of benefit of doubt. I am thinking that when the College Board made those kids at Packer school (not necessarily Packer kids, just kids who took the SAT at the Packer location) retake the test because of testing irregularities, it did not formally allege that any cheating actually took place.</p>
<p>The punishment for Nayeem Ahsan, however, seems pretty definitive; the folks at the Department of Education probably anticipate that they may have to defend that decision in court.</p>
<p>A few more details.</p>
<p>[Stuyvesant</a> HS students to take exams again in wake of cheating scandal - NYPOST.com](<a href=“Stuyvesant HS students to take exams again in wake of cheating scandal”>Stuyvesant HS students to take exams again in wake of cheating scandal)</p>
<p>Retaking a test is a harsh consequence? </p>
<p>Will the NY DOE draw plans to build a student rubber room filled with legos, board games, college guidance books, and the latest Apple electronics? </p>
<p>How about inviting those kids to spend their summer doing hard manual labor on campus? Of course, the chance that someone is actually manning the school during the summer might be slim to none. After all, aren’t July and August the best months for educators?</p>
<p>Serious consequences for Nayeem Ahsan. As my post #115 makes clear, I do NOT think the retake for the other students is harsh at all.</p>
<p>Stuyvesant is actually open in the summer. There are summer classes for students who failed their courses. I believe there are also free remedial courses for minorities who were offered admission into Stuyvesant despite not passing the entrance exam cutoff that applies to everyone else (the “Discovery Program”?); the idea is to help them catch up before they enter Stuyvesant.</p>
<p>(There are also free prep courses for students from poor families to help them prepare for the entrance exam, though I am not sure where those courses are held, and when.)</p>
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<p>They did away with the Discovery Program some years ago because of a dispute between Stuy’s administration and Bloomberg’s Education department over eligibility criteria. </p>
<p>Taking a data point, in 1990, a given candidate for that program must be within 60 points of Stuyvesant’s cut-off score and from a low-income background. </p>
<p>Some years ago, the educrats decided that Stuy’s summer discovery program must accept everyone who fell short of even Brooklyn Tech’s cutoff score. If we’re going by cut-off scores in 1990, that’s a difference of over 225 points/800. As one older alum said, that’s a lot more wrong answers and six weeks isn’t enough time to get them up to Stuy’s level.</p>
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<p>Perhaps I misunderstand the ramifications of a suspension to be served next year! Perhaps I am too naive to believe that this level of organized cheating should be rewarded by a failure on the exam and an immediate expulsion from the specialized school.</p>
<p>Aren’t there hundreds of students who do not get the chance to attend Stuyvesant? The cheaters deserve to trade places with the less fortunate ones. </p>
<p>A slap on the wrist simply encourages the ones that did not get caught (yet) to continue and, when caught, file petitions for leniency.</p>