Man Pleads Guilty in Testing Scam

A California man has pleaded guilty to helping students cheat on U.S. university entrance exams by supplying them pencils encoded with the answers for up to $9,000 each, the U.S. prosecutor said Friday.

The office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said Po Chieng Ma, 46, pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of jumping bail.

The U.S. attorney’s office said Ma employed expert test takers to take the national standardized tests on the East Coast. They would then telephone the answers to his office on the West Coast, where because of a difference in time zones the tests were given three hours later.

The answers were secretly encoded on pencils and given to Ma’s clients, who brought them into the tests. The exams were for admission into universities, post-graduate schools and law schools and were administered by the private Educational Testing Service.

The students paid between $2,000 and $9,000 each, the U.S. attorney said.