Electronic Grad School Test Challenged : Education: Exam preparation firm says the computerized version of the GRE is not cheat-proof. The findings have prompted plans for increased security.

A national program that allows students to take a computerized version of the Graduate Record Examination--the test required for admission to many graduate schools--is being suspended temporarily because it is not cheat-proof, Educational Testing Service officials said Thursday.

In a stunning admission that highlights the fallibility of the testing service’s security measures, officials said they were prompted to act after a New York City test preparation firm revealed that 20 of its employees had managed to memorize much of the test in just a few weeks.

Kaplan Educational Centers, the New York firm, told the testing service last week that Kaplan employees--who each took the test once and were asked to remember as many questions as they could--had accumulated 70% to 80% of the questions on the computerized test.

Kaplan officials said they did not distribute the questions, but merely wished to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of the computerized testing system.

“This is a wake-up call,” said Jonathan Grayer, president of Kaplan Educational Centers, the largest test preparation company in the nation. “If computer testing is the best way to assess skills, then so be it. . . . But what’s most important is that the exam be a valid measure. And we believe that, as of yesterday, it wasn’t.”

This year, about 420,000 college students will take the GRE, which is used by graduate schools in much the same way the SAT is used in college admissions. For a fee, Kaplan offers test preparation courses that are designed to boost GRE scores.

About one in four students who take the GRE will do so on computer this year. The pencil-and-paper test, which is offered just four times a year, includes a different set of questions each time it is given. The computerized test, which is offered almost every day of the year, is not completely changed each day--and therein lies the problem.

“We don’t have an infinite supply of questions,” said Nancy S. Cole, president of the New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service. Cole stressed that the computerized test has an adaptive function intended to ensure that students do not see the same set of questions. Cole said the findings of Kaplan’s unusual experiment are cause for concern, though there is no evidence that any test results have been compromised.

Cole said she is grateful that Kaplan officials safeguarded their findings and shared them only with the testing service. But, she noted, coaching firms such as Kaplan “have a special motivation to wish that computer-based testing would go away.”

With infrequent paper-and-pencil tests, she said, such firms can offer large preparatory classes a few times a year. Computerized tests, she said, require coaching firms to offer more classes, to invest in computer equipment--and thus to make less of a profit.

After revealing their findings, Cole said, “(Kaplan) proposed that they had shown us this significant security breach and our response should be to immediately withdraw the computer-based test.”

Instead, Cole said, Kaplan’s findings have prompted an acceleration of previously planned security enhancements. “We are firmly committed to computer-based testing,” she said.

To enhance security, Cole said, the testing service will halt the tests during the last week in December to implement new procedures that will guarantee that “any one question will be shown to smaller proportions of students.”

Students who have planned to take the computerized test during that period will have to reschedule, she said. Testing will resume Jan. 3 but may be interrupted on other days as well.

The brief suspension of computerized testing could not come at a worse time of year for many students who are hurrying to take the GRE to meet graduate school application deadlines. But testing officials said every effort will be made to help students reschedule.

Officials at Kaplan Educational Centers said they initiated their experiment after some of their clients said they had heard it was possible to obtain lists of test questions in advance.

Jose Ferreira, Kaplan’s GRE director, said that in designing the experiment he did not tell his employees to remember any particular segment of the test.

“We sent in people any old way and said remember what you can,” he said. “If we had wanted to be very efficient, we could have said, ‘memorize 10 questions.’ But we wanted to emulate something anyone could do. . . . The idea was: What can a few people put together just by talking to their friends?”

Grayer, the president of Kaplan, acknowledged that what his employees did was a violation of copyright law.

“But we felt obligated to . . . unearth this because it was not good for anyone,” he said. “An individual college kid or fraternity doesn’t much care about copyright law. If they can increase their scores dramatically, they’re going to do it.”