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Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board and a former governor of West Virginia, said that in addition to bringing in the former F.B.I. chief, Louis J. Freeh, as a consultant, the College Board was also considering additional safeguards over the next year, including bolstering identification requirements for students taking the SAT and taking digital photographs to ensure they are who they say they are.Some educators think this action is long overdue and are calling for harsher penalties.
“The procedures E.T.S. uses to give the test are grossly inadequate in terms of security,” Bernard Kaplan, principal of Great Neck North, testified at the hearing. “Furthermore, E.T.S.’s response when the inevitable cheating occurs is grossly inadequate. Very simply, E.T.S. has made it very easy to cheat, very difficult to get caught.”
While the new security measures represent a change of tone for College Board and Educational Testing Service officials who previously insisted their system was adequate, some superintendents and principals said they did not go far enough. These officials have called for fingerprinting students, increasing stipends for proctors and imposing real consequences on those who cheat. Currently, if the testing service suspects cheating, the students’ scores are canceled and they are permitted to retake the test — with no notification to either their high school or colleges where they apply.Educational Testing Service is already spending about 10% of its budget on security for College Board testing, but whatever they're doing may not be adequate. Bernard Kaplan, principal of the high school where the cheating occurred, says this about the problem.
“It is ridiculously easy to take the test for someone else”Many young people have fake IDs, which are commonly "being bought in bulk from vendors in China" and "nearly undetectable by bar employees". I imagine SAT test proctors also find it hard to spot them.
Related: Student cheating – the SAT, the Internet, and Ted Kennedy
(Cross-posted at Cost of College)
15 comments:
Well, Bernard Kaplan sure seems to have learned a valuable lesson in all of this: it's all someone else's fault.
It's to Kaplan's advantage to have high SAT scores from his school's students, but I don't think there's much he can do to prevent students from cheating the way they did. Of course, it is the student who is responsible for his own cheating, but the ETS makes it relatively easy to do so. And like a ripple effect, one person cheating puts pressure on many others.
If it were me, I'd be contrite in my press conference, hold the students (and parents) accountable and at least pay lip service to changing the culture of the school a bit. Instead, he basically blames ETS's security, as though it's a given that kids will cheat as long as cheating is easy.
I guess what I'm getting at is this: there is a small national spotlight on Great Neck right now, and this guy represents the whole town when he gives these quotes. If I lived in Great Neck, I'd want to hear more about how we're a good town full of good people, not excuses about why such cheating is inevitable.
It's a moral argument, but that's where I'm at.
Perhaps ETS should "red flag" students who are testing at a site other than the high school they attend for extra security. Obviously, not everyone who goes to an alternate site does so for the purposes of cheating. But those who do choose an alternate testing site ought to go through a higher level of screening.
PWN - Kaplan should hire you as his PR person. ;)
But seriously, I agree that he does seem to be sending the message that kids will cheat if it's easy.
Crimson Wife - That's a good suggestion. What some are suggesting, that students only take the tests in their own districts, is really unworkable.
Yes, my kid didn't take it in our district because of the testing conditions here. The school that is closest to home for testing used those chairs with little fold out desks -- for the testing! Oldest child did it once there and when I found that out, no one tested there again. You couldn't open the booklet fully, nor see both the booklet and the test sheet at the same time.
So, sure, give my kid extra scrutiny if you want, but he'll test under normal conditions!
From where I sit, the College Board must take action to tighten security. Do I think this sort of cheating only happens on Long Island? Not at all. There's probably a rule of thumb. For every cheating ring which is detected, there are ____ which aren't.
The Great Neck administrators were the people who alerted ETS to their suspicions of cheating: Ms. Rice, the district attorney, said Great Neck North administrators started hearing rumors about students’ cheating in February. The school compiled a list of students who took the test outside the district, then compared SAT scores with grade-point averages. Six students had B to B-minus grades and SAT scores in the 97th percentile, raising suspicion. A handwriting analysis by E.T.S. determined that one student had taken all six tests. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/nyregion/after-arrest-a-wider-inquiry-on-sat-cheating.html
The Great Neck administrators deserve credit for taking action to protect the students who didn't hire ringers. As a parent whose high school students will take a slew of standardized tests, I am very interested in test security. I'll be interested to see if their SAT scores are in line with their PSAT and ACT scores. They should be, from what little I understand of standardized tests.
Bernard Kaplan sure seems to have learned a valuable lesson in all of this: it's all someone else's fault.
lolll!
The principals of these schools are typically on-site when the test is given, right?
That seemed to be the case in Tarrytown, where I took the test, and I know it's been true elsewhere.
it's a given that kids will cheat as long as cheating is easy...
Well.....uh.....
I'd say it's a given kids will cheat if cheating is easy.
The school that is closest to home for testing used those chairs with little fold out desks -- for the testing! Oldest child did it once there and when I found that out, no one tested there again. You couldn't open the booklet fully, nor see both the booklet and the test sheet at the same time.
Good Lord.
That is APPALLING.
I speak as a person who absolutely knows just how hard it is to deal with the cra*** SAT test booklet under perfect conditions.
Unbelievable.
Fake IDs being bought in bulk from China, you say.
I never got around to posting this, but a professor friend tells me that his graduate program was getting GRE vebal scores from Chinese nationals that didn't jibe with their scores on TOEFL (sp?) & other tests. They took it for granted the scores were fake & didn't admit Chinese nationals. After awhile they stopped getting apps from China.
This is a graduate program in humanities/social sciences.
I have to say -- in my experience if you make cheating easy, yeah, you get cheating. I figure my job is to keep the honest students honest by not making it easy to cheat, but any place you have a large number of nearly anonymous students, you risk cheating. There were a ton of methods we tried to reduce when I was a TA at UC Berkeley (with 1500 students in Gen Chem), and that was with checking IDs, having TAs check that their students were there, etc.
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