Washington area residents are by now familiar with the high-profile cheating episode at a prestigious girls’ private school this fall, where at least eight students from other, equally prestigious private schools apparently took the SAT I together. When the College Board noticed the suspect scores, an investigation was launched, and six students from one of the schools volunteered confessions.
Cheating is not new. When you give a group of students a golden opportunity to cheat, it is difficult to avoid. Only a handful of secondary schools and universities, with or without honor codes, have been able to avoid frequent problems of student cheating.
What is relatively new is the climate surrounding the students. In the last ten years, the test prep industry has grown to the point where almost every student or parent feels the pressure to enroll in a course or tutoring to prepare adequately for tests that the College Board had originally intended to be prep-proof. The letters in SAT had stood for, until recently, Scholastic Aptitude Test. Then the “Aptitude” was changed to “Assessment,” and now the SAT stands for nothing specific, like the ‘S’ in Harry S Truman.
To gain an edge, test prep organizations regularly infiltrate SAT testing sites and copy down questions. After every administration of the SAT I, for example, the Princeton Review sends college counselors everywhere a synopsis of what the test was like, although the Princeton Review claims not to ever write down questions verbatim. An extreme version of theft occurred recently here in the Washington area when a locally based test prep organization had appropriated virtually an entire SAT II math test and used it as a review test for their students. This past June, students at the Jewish Day School, who were taking the math SAT II at an irregular test date, and for which only a few copies of the test were produced, happened to be staring at virtually the exact test they had studied with their test prep tutors.
This was a story first reported in the Lion’s Tale, the student newspaper at the Jewish Day School: http://www.lionstale.org/jun02/n-sat.html and was also reported in the Washington Post.
SAT tutoring now costs more than
$100 per hour in the Washington area, and costs in the New York area have been
more than $300 and $400 per hour. Might
parents and students soon start a twelve-step program to rid themselves of test
prep addiction?
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