Welcome to the Evil House of Cheat

Gregg Colton likes to recall a minor case of deja vu that he was forced to endure a couple of years ago. The private investigator and former director of test security for an examination firm was reading an advertisement that guaranteed a passing grade on a state contractor’s exam after just two days of study.

He’d seen hundreds of similar ads from such “cram schools” but after further scrutiny, he had to admit this one was special. The company claimed it could guarantee a passing grade for any student because it could provide answers to every question on the test. The “course” lasted two days simply to give “students” enough time to memorize the answers.

To figure out how the company acquired a copy of the exam, Colton, who specializes in industrial espionage and test security, enrolled a female investigator in the class for $250 and armed her with a tiny, quarter-sized wireless video camera. It didn’t take long for the instructors to blurt out that they were able to copy the examination by employing fake test-takers armed with similar equipment. They would videotape each page of the test and transmit the image to a partner waiting outside with a receiver.

Colton’s investigator proved to be a quick study and passed the four-hour test in a half hour. And what does that mean for the rest of us? “She could build a skyscraper and she doesn’t know rebar [iron reinforcing bars] from anything.”

Cheating on tests has long been a bastion of low technology--the quick glance to the side, micro-handwriting on the thigh, coded Band-Aids and complex signaling with crossed and uncrossed legs. But as the stakes have increased with large-scale assessment testing, the need for higher scores has transformed the playing field.

Former President Ronald Reagan aptly described the leakiness of modern times when he said on a visit to London in 1989 that “information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped with barbed wire. It wafts across the electrified, booby-trapped borders. Breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it was lace.”

Reagan, of course, was thinking of the powerlessness of Communist governments to stop the flow of information from the West. But his statement could just as easily be taken as a manifesto of the modern cheater. Answers are the oxygen of the modern age, blowing through packed and impersonal examination halls with ease.

The sad forecast for the future can be summed up thusly: Large-scale organized cheating has become the shadow image of large-scale testing.

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Since the earliest days of the high-tech revolution, cheaters have used programmable calculators to store notes and formulas. More recently, a new generation of students has discovered the wonders of grabbing term papers off the Internet from such sites as School Sucks, IvyEssays.com and the Evil House of Cheat.

But the art of cheating long ago transcended those minor uses of technology in pursuit of individual gain. Instead, it has become a global enterprise focused on stealing whole tests so the answers can be sold to hundreds--even thousands--of test-takers for princely sums. Cutting-edge devices include wireless video cameras, miniature tape recorders and electromagnetic radiation detectors that can read information on a computer display terminal from a distance. Once considered exotic, these tools of spies and drug dealers have become common pieces of societies obsessed with monitoring themselves. For as little as $150, you can buy a miniature wireless video camera from stores or Web sites specializing in surveillance equipment. For a little more, you can buy the same camera deftly concealed in eyeglass cases, purses, coat linings, caps, ties, pagers, boomboxes and a cute little stuffed bunny, advertised by one company as the “perfect nanny cam.”

The number of high-tech cheating cases is small, but the cases that have surfaced show few limits to the expense or discomfort that cheaters are prepared to endure for a good test score. In one case in Thailand, 75 students were caught trying to cheat on an army college entrance exam by using a radio receiver stuffed in their underwear. The students, who were vying with 10,000 others for 400 openings, had each paid $2,000 to participate in the unsuccessful scheme.

The transgressions of the Thai students seem downright petty compared to the case of 81,000 Nigerian students who were caught cheating on a university entrance exam in 1997, and the disqualification of all 10,000 students who took the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in China in 1992.

What all the evidence suggests--the use of ever more sophisticated technology and the instances of mass cheating--is a fundamental change of the human condition: The very perception of cheating as sin has begun to drop into the same moral gray zone as infidelity, tax evasion, recreational drug use and a host of other activities that once grimly stood at the gates of hell.

Indeed, we live a world in which our values are in flux, contorting, as it were, to adapt to the fragmented and hyperspeed atmosphere of modern life. Consider the words of Stephen Davis, a professor of psychology at Emporia State University in Kansas, who, over the last decade, has surveyed more than 17,000 students across the country on cheating: “It’s the diploma at the end of the trail that counts these days, not the process to get the diploma.”

“Cheating is like adultery,” one of his respondents wrote. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

Since World War II, college enrollment has grown sevenfold to about 15 million students today. In the process, higher education has transformed itself from an elite experience to one that is edging closer to becoming the norm. In 1940, less than 6% of the country had attended college. Today, that figure stands at close to a third of the population. Large-scale standardized tests have allowed students to not only be processed and assessed by the millions, but also to be compared and judged against each other as if they were in a beauty contest.

There is almost universal agreement that academic cheating is more widespread today than in the past. In a 1941 survey, 21% of college students admitted cheating at least once on a exam. By the late 1980s, according to Davis’ surveys, that figure had risen to about 50% of college students and has stayed relatively constant since then.

Of the cheaters, more than half are repeat offenders, cheating an average of six times during their college careers. About 10% to 20% of those have cheated more than a dozen times, placing them in Davis’ hard-core category.

“I’ve talked with a lot of them and they are just normal kids, no different than anyone else,” he says. “This is just what they perceive as the way to get to the goal, which is to get a degree and a job.”

Davis’ findings might even be considered rather rosy compared to those of Donald McCabe, an associate provost of Rutgers University’s Newark, who conducted three large cheating surveys in the 1990s. McCabe cast a wider net than Davis, who focused only on test cheating. McCabe also tallied transgressions such as plagiarism, falsifying a bibliography, submitting work by another student, using crib notes and helping other students cheat. He reported about two-thirds of college students admitted cheating in some form.

One finding that goes against the grain: McCabe says schools with honor codes had much lower levels of cheating. The idea of an honor code may seem quaintly archaic these days, but for McCabe it represents one piece of the puzzle in re-creating a sense of academic community. “If you bring students into the process, they respond,” he says. “It’s no longer this us versus them thing. It becomes our problem.”

The idea of academic community hinges on the sense of a common journey among kindred souls. But much of higher education has become a competitive nightmare. Parental pressures, the enormous cost of higher education, and the varying cultural perceptions of what exactly counts as cheating have helped cast an ethically gray hue over the issue.

Many of these factors converge in the case of foreign students. A study last year at USC found that although foreign students made up just 14.5% of the student body, they accounted for nearly half of those accused of “academic dishonesty,” USC’s term for cheating.

G. William Hill, a professor of psychology at Kennesaw State University who specializes in cross-cultural psychology, says one of the key problems is that not all cultures approach education with the emphasis on individual accomplishment seen in American schools. “When you come from a culture where collaboration is encouraged to one where individualism is encouraged, that’s a conflict,” Hill says.

Dixon C. Johnson, executive director of USC’s Office of International Services, notes that the stakes for foreign students are often uncomfortably high because of parental pressures (it transcends all borders), the high cost of living in this country and the shame of failure. For some overseas students, cheating on a test such as the TOEFL is not an issue of values, but simply one of practicality. It is just another hurdle to overcome in the journey to America.

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Assessment testing is largely a product of the last century, tracing its roots back to Sir Francis Galton, a 19th-century British scientist who developed the field of biostatistics. He is perhaps best remembered today as the father of eugenics--the belief in genetic improvement through selective breeding. For Galton, intelligence, or “eminence” as he called it, was a hereditary trait that could be discerned through certain physical attributes.

Galton’s theories were debunked by the turn of the century, but a French psychologist, Alfred Binet, soon picked up the quest. Binet shifted the focus of investigation from physical attributes to psychological ones. His test, introduced in a paper written with Theodore Simon in 1905, attempted to measure such abilities as memory, reasoning, comprehension, time orientation and creativity. Binet later developed the concept of the “mental level,” which described the intellectual versus physical age of a subject.

World War I brought intelligence testing to the mainstream in the mass evaluation of soldiers who entered the U.S. Army. The Army’s multiple-choice “Alpha” test, which was administered to 1.75 million soldiers from 1917 to 1919, was the first application of large-scale intelligence testing.

The test sparked a degree of controversy because of disputes over its racial and ethnic biases and its somewhat alarming finding that the average mental age of a U.S. soldier was between 13 and 14. But it was largely perceived as a success, at least in its ability to efficiently evaluate large numbers of subjects. By 1926, the College Board adopted the Alpha test model and created the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Over the years, large-scale assessment testing moved downward into lower grades and upward into the realms of professional certification. Testing is a modern ritual, a rite of passage to each succeeding level of life in complex and crowded societies. In many ways, these large-scale tests have created both the incentive and the means to cheat.

Reports of cheating rings are few, but in the cases that have emerged, the methodology is so simple and sensible-- from a criminal standpoint--that you have to wonder why it isn’t more widespread.

One of the most notorious cases involved a bicoastal scheme that exploited the three-hour time difference between New York and Los Angeles to provide test-takers with answers to the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), a requirement for most business schools. The cheating ring, which operated from 1993 to 1996, provided answers not only for the GMAT, but also the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and the TOEFL for up to $9,000 per student.

The operation was run by Po Chieng Ma, an Arcadia resident who advertised a five-hour crash course on the GMAT through his American Test Center in El Monte. But the course was a sham. Ma would have expert test-takers sit for the exams in New York and then relay the answers to Ma’s Los Angeles office, where they were encoded onto pencils and distributed to the students before the West Coast exam began. Ma and seven others were arrested in 1996, after supplying answers to several hundred test-takers. Ma pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of jumping bail.

The Educational Testing Service began scrambling sections of the test to prevent the time-zone scheme even before Ma’s case. But not all testing companies have taken such precautions, leaving cheaters with a few avenues that they can still exploit. In 1997, three people were arrested in connection with the theft of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), a test required by most law schools. One of the suspects had enrolled for the test under a false name and was able to enter the exam room using a fake identification card. After the test began, he fled with his copy. Two students were waiting at the University of Hawaii to take the same test two hours later. During the exam, answers were transmitted from Los Angeles to the students, who were equipped with alphanumeric pagers. They scored in the 99th percentile on the LSAT, but were caught after police identified the suspect who stole the test from Los Angeles through the fingerprint he was required to provide before entering the examination room. All three men were arraigned Jan. 7 on charges of robbery, grand theft and conspiracy.

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Of the 2 million people who take the Scholastic Assessment Test each year (the name of the test was changed from Scholastic Aptitude Test [SAT] in 1994), the Educational Testing Service, which administers the test, reports that it investigates just .1% to .2% of scores--about 2,000 to 4,000 people.

The testing companies have responded to the threats with their own high- and low-tech measures, such as offering different versions of a test and using computers to search for unusual similarities between completed tests and abnormally high improvements in scores.

With the SAT, for example, tests are scanned and scored electronically by computer. One of the automatic triggers for an investigation is a large score increase--more than 350 total in the verbal and math portions of the SAT--by people who have taken the test more than once. Handwriting is checked to detect impersonators and the scores of those sitting near the suspected cheater are also scanned electronically to find statistically improbable similarities.

The most significant advance in testing technology has been the recent introduction of a method developed by the Educational Testing Service called Computer Adaptive Testing. Since 1986, the company has been gradually phasing in the use of computers in testing, versus the old pencil-and-paper process. In Computer Adaptive Testing, each student sits before a computer terminal and is presented with a question chosen by the computer out of a large pool of questions. Depending on how the student answers, the next question pops up and so on. The combination of questions is different for every student, thus ending the traditional cheating method of looking at your neighbor’s exam and the modern method of exploiting time-zone differences. The GRE general test, TOEFL and GMAT are now offered in computerized form.

And what does the 21st century promise? Perhaps the biggest change will come with the arrival of a type of testing that Randy Bennett, a research director for the Educational Testing Service, has named “Generation R”--”R” for reinvention. Today, teaching and testing are separate events--there is class and then there is the test, which serves as a kind of snapshot of ability.

As computers are integrated into the classroom, Bennett says, it will be possible to skip testing and evaluate students on a constant basis by monitoring their work on the computer. In essence, instruction and assessment become the same thing.

The advent of Generation R could spell the end of traditional testing. It would open an era of education that is undoubtedly more intrusive, but perhaps more accurate and secure. Cheating Generation R would mean either hacking the system or having someone assume your entire school identity. “You can’t have someone take over your educational career for you,” Bennett says.

But even Bennett will not promise that the future will bring an end to cheating. As most security experts concede, absolute security is an illusion. With enough resources and finesse, there is always a way to penetrate any system.

Colton, the private investigator, says that higher stakes only encourage more determined efforts to cheat--a kind of arms race that seesaws between testers and cheaters. He predicts that as the stakes increase, cheaters will be drawn into higher and higher levels of crime, such as bribery of test officials and stealing tests.

“As long as there is a market, there will never be an end to cheating,” he says. “It’s like organized crime or prostitution or drug dealing. As long as there is a market, someone will provide.”