Over at Curmudgeon Central, Rick Jones appropriately eviscerates the Educational Testing Service for its role—the role being negligent facilitator–in an unfolding scandal involving students cheating on their SATs by having surrogates take their tests. 20 people have been arrested thus far as either the fake test-taker of the fraudulent scholar paying for said test-taker, and Rick’s guess that there must be a hundred times the ETS’s estimate of 150 incidents of cheating on the SATs is extremely conservative. The problem is that the SATs are taken under incredibly lax security, and Rick reveals something I never would have suspected: if someone is caught cheating after the SAT service investigates, he or she is given a refund and allowed to take the test again—and no college is ever notified! Rick writes…
“…in a just universe, the cretinous yahoos at the CB/ETS who decided on this policy would lose their jobs, have “unethical moron” branded into their foreheads, and be publicly pilloried. Preferably literally.”
If the SAT’s cannot guarantee that their test scores are not frauds, then every student who is beaten out in his quest for admission to a top college has reason to doubt whether the result was fair. The system has no integrity, and cannot be trusted. The fact that it may be easy to cheat does not mitigate the misconduct of the cheaters in any way, but it still demonstrates a significant breach of care and responsibility by those in authority. Rick suggests that
“…every college that admitted one of these lying little bastards based on false information should immediately expel those students and sue the ETS.”
I heartily concur.
You can read Rick’s whole post here.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s unfortunate that all of this has taken place. The even bigger question I have is when did the pressure for perfect SAT scores become so great they we’ve resorted to cheating and lying?
My guess? From the very beginning.
The problem with this argument is that the colleges don’t want to know. Almost all colleges are under pressure to increase their enrollment. Many of them have dramatically increased their size in the last 10 years, racking up debt building luxury student accommodations. They are also under pressure to increase the SAT /ACT scores of their students for ranking purposes. This was all done in a stagnant economy with a stagnant population.
No college wants to be informed about someone cheating on the SAT. They are more the happy to go along with the fairy tale especially when the students who have the resources to cheat are also the ones who can actually favor to pay. The dirty secret about this generation of college students is that they have no savings for college. They all expected someone else to pay for it. A college really can’t afford to pass over one who actually can pay full tuition.
Now, to give ETS the benefit of the doubt (oops, I threw up a little bit writing that), it is very difficult to prove cheating. It is possible that this policy was instituted to allow the proctors to remove a student and invalidate a test when they knew cheating was going on, but couldn’t prove it. I can rarely prove cheating on a test. Students (and their parents) require more proof than a capital murder case. It isn’t sufficient to catch the with a cheat sheet, you have to prove they actually used it. It isn’t sufficient to show that they had the same wrong answers on a test (we studied together, so we were thinking the same way), you need video evidence that shows them passing the papers back and forth. A video just showing them glancing at each other’s papers isn’t enough, you can’t prove they actually intended to cheat with that. In such an atmosphere, the policy might have been a pragmatic one that was then misapplied in cases when you could prove you had an impostor.
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