133 Cheat on GMAT

Plus, after crackdown, Australia reports big drop in cheating searches. Plus, cheating on the Toronto Bar Exam.

Issue 100

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At Least 133 Caught Cheating on GMAT - and It’s Not the First Time

The GMAT, one of the gateway assessments to graduate school, announced this month that it has invalidated the scores of 133 test-takers for cheating. The solid website Poets & Quants, which covers graduate business schools, has the story.

The short version is a cheater in India was selling test-taking services, impersonation services, guaranteeing high scores. According to the reporting:

candidates paid between $4,000 to $20,000 to get a member of the online cheating syndicate to take the test for them. In some cases, they were able to achieve scores as high as 780, a result that would put the candidate into the top 1% of GMAT test-takers in the world.

Police in India arrested six people in the cheating ring.

The thing is, these cheating providers were not hiding. They were literally advertising to beat the GMAT for money. The ads go back at least a year, probably more. In one of their ads, the cheaters said bluntly:

when things are online there is always a way to beat the system.

And, as Poets & Quants points out, this is not the first cheating scandal involving the GMAT. Back in 2002, according to the Financial Times, a different cheating ring:

under the guise of “tutoring” services, used fake driver’s licences and passports to take the GMAT in New York on behalf of others for a fee of $3,000 to $5,000. Almost 600 exams were taken before [the leader] and four friends were caught and sentenced

Cheating on the Bar Exam in Toronto

There’s a multi-layer investigation underway in Canada surrounding allegations that test information for the Toronto Bar Exam may have leaked and that students may have cheated. Past test results have been delayed and future exam dates have been cancelled.

The Toronto Star has the story. Plus an editorial. And a follow up story ($) linking the cheating, maybe, to the global contract cheating industry.

The Law Society of Ontario (LSO), which administers the exam, said “third parties” may have been involved in leaking - that is to say selling - exam questions. And while details aren’t abundant, it’s clear the potential breaches in test security were related to the exam being moved online.

The Star and the LSO report that the bar exam, “shifted online due to the pandemic in June 2020” and that:

the investigation is looking only at the tests after the change. Saturday’s announcement said the rescheduled exams will be “paper-based and held in-person in Toronto.”

Note that, in the wake of the cheating, the exam is going back to in-person and on-paper.

The follow-up story also includes that the LSO hired two companies to assist with exam security - Paradigm Testing and MonitorEDU. And while I do not know either of them, based on the descriptions of their services in The Star, they were engaged in securing exam delivery, not necessarily in securing exam materials ahead of the test sessions.

Australia Says Its Crackdown Led to a 24% Drop in Misconduct Searches

A recent news story in Australia says that the country’s effort to squeeze cheating providers by making their services illegal (see Issue 63 or Issue 84), may be working.

From the story:

Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert will release figures on Friday that show after a new Higher Education Integrity Unit started up a year ago, searches for cheating services in Australia dropped by 23.5 per cent during the last half of 2021.

Continuing:

New laws were passed in September 2020 that allowed TEQSA to block academic cheating websites using court orders.

The agency has identified a whopping 300 websites suspected of offering such services.

Obviously, 300 is not even a fraction of a fraction of these providers; the experts in the news story concede as much.

Still, progress is progress and it illustrates what can be done when governments take the threat of academic misconduct seriously - actually working to crimp the supply of service providers and limit their pernicious marketing tactics.

As an example, from the article:

Chief Commissioner Peter Coaldrake said cheating services were targeting students through social media platforms and online marketplaces.

He said the regulator was working with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Gumtree to remove posts that promoted cheating.

As we’ve seen repeatedly, ads for cheating providers make cheating seem easy and low risk. They inflate and trade on student stresses and pressures. They confuse students about the allowability of cheating, using words such as “tutors” and “homework help.” Some even tout their affiliations with schools and professors to seem legitimate.

Pressuring social media providers to remove ads and solicitation posts is a viable, potentially valuable, way to curb cheating - or at least help limit how many or how often students go looking for ways to cheat.

It’s also more evidence that Australia stands essentially alone in their efforts to protect their educational resources.

Leading K12 Digital Curriculum Provider to Add Integrity Features

According to a press release, Imagine Learning, which bills itself as “the largest provider of digital curriculum solutions in the U.S.,” will add academic integrity features to its offerings.

The release says that there are two tools on the way: Speed Radar and Plagiarism Checker. From the release:

Speed Radar is another new feature that alerts teachers when students move through content too quickly, which could indicate low engagement with content or the student's use of a browser extension to fast-forward through content. This feature helps teachers easily examine a student submission and decide the appropriate next steps.

Plagiarism Checker includes, the release says:

district-level settings, such as IP Registry and the Secure Lock Browser.

Good, I say.

The more tools and resources that teachers have to detect and deter misconduct, the better. And the more tools like these that are in the market, the more likely students are to reevaluate their risk/reward calculations.