The SAT cheating scandal started with a handful of students at Great Neck North High School who reportedly paid a graduate of the school now in college to take the SAT test for them. The scam worked, at least at first. The average and below-average students scored among the top test takers in the nation and no one noticed until a fellow student dropped a dime on them.
The Great Neck North students allegedly paid Sam Eshaghoff, 19, as much as $2,500 to take the test for them. Eshagoff was charged with a felony and the students that hired him face misdemeanor charges. Although some argued that this should be handled as an internal matter by the school, we disagreed.
First of all Eshagoff and even some of the people who hired him are longer students at Great Neck North. More importantly the scandal calls into serious question the results of SAT testing by the College Board.
We worried that the Great Neck North scandal may be just the tip of the iceberg. It appears we were right. The probe has broadened and now includes 20 students and several high schools including Great Neck South, North Shore Hebrew Academy, Roslyn High School, St. Mary’s High School and, possibly, a high school in Queens. Investigators say as many as 40 students and test-takers may soon be arrested.
There are those who excuse the cheating saying the SAT tests put too much pressure on the students. There’s some truth to that. Students know that their futures will be affected by their results on this exam.
But we think Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice hit the nail on the head when she announced 13 additional arrests at a press conference on Tuesday.
“This is a crime,” she said. “Make no mistake, as the system stands now, hard-working students are taking a back seat to the cheaters.”
But the focus of the SAT investigation needs to shift.
Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North says it is “ridiculously easy to cheat. All they need to get into the school is just any school ID with their picture on it, which any fifth-grader can make on their computer.”
ETS, the company hired by College Board to administer the SAT test, has dropped the ball. They know that colleges from Long Island to San Francisco place tremendous weight on the results of the SAT test and ETS should have made a greater effort to make it difficult cheat. They should be running periodic checks to discover a cheating patter either by looking for similar mistakes on exams with high scores in a given region or by looking for students whose scores were unexpectedly high.
An ETS spokesman said the Nassau County arrests should “serve as a wake-up call to any students, not only on Long Island or in New York but across the country, who are thinking of risking their futures with such an unethical and foolish act.”
The arrests should also serve as a wake-up call for ETS.
State Sen. Ken Lavalle, the chairman of the Higher Education Committee, which is investigating the SAT scandal, took aim at the parents of the cheaters.
“There are parents that are complicit in this,” he said. “They are involved. You can’t tell me that students are walking around with $3,500, or $2,500, or $1,200. That’s a lot of money, and that means the parents were involved.”
Even if it’s true, that won’t be easy to prove.
Until changes are made in the testing security, Rice is moving in the right direction by treating the cheaters as criminals and making an example of them.
A Blank Slate Media Editorial
