ROLLING HILLS : Teacher Fired for Giving Test Questions to Students

A private high school teacher has been fired for giving his students questions from the national Advanced Placement test.

Officials at Rolling Hills Preparatory School on the Palos Verdes Peninsula refused to identify the teacher, saying only that he taught history and was “well-liked by his students.”

A week before the May 15 Advanced Placement history test, the teacher handed out a “review sheet” to seven students, said Peter McCormack, headmaster of the school.

“There was almost 100% correlation on the review sheet to the questions asked on the exam,” McCormack said. “There were four essay questions and 70 multiple choice questions on the review sheet. The order they were presented in was different, but the questions were almost identical.”

The tests are given annually by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J. Students can receive college credit or bypass entry-level college courses by scoring well.

The cheating was discovered when a student noticed that the cellophane wrap on his test had been torn. A school investigation led to the teacher, who had been put in charge of administering the test. He was fired the next day. McCormack said the students were not disciplined because they were “misled” by the teacher.

The cheating affair did not end there. The night before the test, a student faxed a copy of the review sheet to a friend at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. Two students there saw the sheet before taking the test the next day.

Principal Kelly Johnson said those students were disciplined because “they knew where the questions came from.”

All nine students will have to take the test again.