New USC Entrance Test Problem : Football: Haslip battles Educational Testing Service after it alleges that he cheated on his SAT.

USC, on the verge of reviving its storied football tradition under Coach John Robinson, is encountering some new academic embarrassments.

In the past year, three top Trojan recruits have been accused, in effect, of cheating on their college entrance examinations. A fourth recruit was accused in 1993 but, unlike the others, he was disqualified before he could matriculate.

No other Division I-A football school is known to have accumulated as many challenges to its recruits’ entrance exam scores as has USC, according to a Times survey that drew responses from nine of 10 conferences across the country.

The latest cheating allegation involves Kenneth Haslip, a track and football star at John Muir High in Pasadena who enrolled at USC on a football scholarship last fall after scoring a qualifying mark on the Scholastic Assessment Test on his fourth try.

Haslip, a cornerback who did not play last season because of a knee injury, denies cheating on his entrance exam. He says his life remains in turmoil while he awaits the outcome of binding arbitration proceedings.

If he loses his case, Haslip’s scholarship will be revoked; he will owe USC about $20,000 for costs incurred during his freshman year and he will be required to repay that debt before he can play at any other school, according to his attorney, J. Anthony Willoughby of Beverly Hills.

Moreover, said Willoughby, Haslip “will forever suffer the humiliation and taint of allegedly cheating on his SAT.”

Haslip’s test results came under suspicion last Sept. 6 when the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., received a telephone call from a “score user,” presumably meaning a college or university, questioning his score.

Citing confidentiality rules, ETS will not disclose the caller’s identity.

Haslip had scored 780 out of a maximum 1,600 points on the SAT, which qualified him for admission to USC. Under NCAA rules, recruits must score at least 700 points on the test and have maintained a 2.0 grade-point average in college prep classes to be eligible as freshmen athletes.

On three previous attempts, Haslip failed to score higher than 510. Then he scored 780 in the exam he took March 19, 1994, at Muir High.

Security personnel at ETS performed a handwriting and fingerprint analysis of Haslip’s several tests and ruled out the possibility that someone had taken it for him.

Next, they matched his test with other test takers in the examination room, looking for similar patterns of answers, errors and erasures.

Based on those findings, Jacqueline R. Berrien, an SAT test security analyst, informed Haslip in a letter dated Sept. 26 that “we believe there is substantial evidence to support canceling your March 19, 1994 SAT. . . .

“For example,” she told him, “there is an unusual amount of agreement between your answer and another test taker at the test center, and your performance on similar sections of the test is not consistent. In addition, there is substantial difference between these scores and others you have earned on the test.

“The evidence suggests that copying or communication with another test taker may have occurred and that the questioned scores may be invalid.”

Haslip was given a two-week deadline to provide any information in his defense before an ETS board of review made a further ruling on his case. Among his submissions were letters from tutors who coached him in preparation for the March 19 test.

In that exam, Haslip boosted his verbal score by 150 points and his math score by 120 points over the test he had taken two months earlier. ETS officials generally contend that coaching can increase a student’s scores by 35-40 points on each part of the exam, but that claim has been challenged as a gross underestimate by operators of private test preparation firms.

Ultimately, Haslip’s 780 score was declared suspect and, like all test takers whose scores are disallowed, he was given the choice of retaking the test, canceling the score, reporting the score to colleges with an explanation or submitting to binding arbitration.

He chose to retake the exam and did so in December, scoring 580.

Haslip’s attorney said he was forced to retake the exam under adverse conditions. First, it was given about the same time as his first semester exams at USC. Second, a mixup in communications left him standing outside Muir High for two hours, waiting in vain for a proctor.

After some frantic phone calls, Haslip was instructed to go to the proctor’s home to take the test. By that time, his attorney said, Haslip was frazzled and upset.

“If I had been his attorney at that time, I would have never let him take the test,” Willoughby said.

Afterward, ETS offered Haslip another round of options ranging from a retake of the test to arbitration. Willoughby entered the case at this point and arranged for sending the case to arbitration, but a quarrel over a deadline prompted ETS to cancel the arbitration.

Willoughby responded by filing a lawsuit on Haslip’s behalf in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on April 26, accusing the Educational Testing Service of breach of contract and asking for $100,000 in damages.

On June 1, however, Haslip agreed to drop the suit after ETS recanted and agreed again to arbitrate, Willoughby said.

“This is an organization that’s out of control,” the attorney said. “You can’t believe the hoops we’ve had to go through. They’ve tried to . . . my client.” ETS’s attorney, John E. Porter, declined to comment.

In addition, Willoughby, a USC alumnus, said he was somewhat suspicious about the recent rash of challenges to Trojan players’ entrance exam scores.

He cited the cases of USC tailback Delon Washington from Dallas and tight end Kenny Cooper from Plant City, Fla., members of Haslip’s freshman class. Both were accused last year of having someone else take the American College Testing exam for them.

Washington was withheld from football for most of the season. He was allowed to return in time for the New Year’s Day Cotton Bowl game after he scored enough on an ACT retake to satisfy testing officials. Cooper’s score was invalidated and he had to leave USC.

An SAT score of about 1,200 for a fourth football player, running back Saladin McCullough, also from Muir, was invalidated in the summer of 1993 as he was about to enter USC during Robinson’s first season back after a 10-year coaching absence.

McCullough will be a sophomore at El Camino College this fall after transferring from Pasadena City, where he was one of the state’s best rushers last year. He has said he still wants to attend USC.

A USC official, who asked that his name not be used, expressed some surprise at the number of football players who had test challenges.

“Sure, that’s unusual, seeing [as] we’ve never had it before,” he said. “To have three in one year is unusual.”

When told about the survey of other Division I-A football conferences, he questioned whether the leagues were fully informed about all challenged test scores.

With the exception of the Southeastern Conference, which refused to disclose any testing information, only the Atlantic Coast Conference reported one alleged cheating case involving a football player in the last year. No conference had as many as two in the last three years and no other Pacific 10 Conference school had any last year.

Like Haslip and his family, Willoughby would like to know who accused his client of possible wrongdoing. They are particularly suspicious because the call to ETS was made on Sept. 6--after Haslip was already enrolled at USC.

“I don’t know,” said Haslip, who is not listed on the current USC roster. “I think someone is carrying out a vendetta or something.”

His mother, Annie, agrees. “It’s just the biggest mess in the world. The idea that someone would do this to him after he’s in school and everything. I just don’t know.”

At USC, Fred Stroock, assistant athletic director in charge of student-athlete academic services, would not comment about the Haslip case, citing student confidentiality.

But he said USC is “committed to not taking students who don’t meet the NCAA requirements. We have to abide by NCAA initial eligibility rules. That’s the standard issue as far as test scores.”

Robinson, out of the country on a vacation cruise, could not be reached for comment.

In his third year since replacing Larry Smith, Robinson has rejuvenated a sagging program with two outstanding recruiting classes. He took over in 1993, a few weeks after Smith’s 6-5-1 team lost to Fresno State, 24-7, in the Freedom Bowl at Anaheim Stadium.

After going 8-5 in 1993, Robinson’s team was 8-3-1 in 1994, including a victory over Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl and a tie against Notre Dame. It was the first time the Trojans had not lost to the Irish in 12 years.

Haslip said Robinson has been supportive while his college career hangs in the balance:

“He told me, ‘I know it’s tough but you’ve got to hang in there and stay focused.’ ”