Dear Associate,

Five years ago I attended my first Association of Test Publishers (ATP) conference. At that conference there were just a few sessions dedicated to the topic of test security. This month’s ATP conference will be offering more than twenty sessions dealing with test security. Clearly the validity, reliability and security of tests is on the mind of many testing professionals. Here’s a sampling of some of the test security sessions offered at the ATP this year:

• Security Trends in Large Scale Testing in Education
• Where’s the Thief?: Getting Results from Your Exam Security Investment
• The Use of Innovative Items and Their Implications for Test Security
• A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: How Enhanced Candidate Authentication Procedures Deter Proxy Testing and Restore Employer Confidence
• Cheating: Personality Predictors and Psychological Mediators
• To Catch A Thief: A Case Study on How GMAC Squashed a Braindump Site
• Test Security: Taking Action and Seeing Results
• Online Secured Testing: Extending the Reach of High Stakes Testing
• Innovative Forensics for Exam Security
• Defense By Association, Part II: Exploring Strategies for Collaborative Action to Combat Test Piracy
• Creating More Secure Exams through Performance-based Testing
• New Testing Methodologies, Technology Developments, and Test Security Threats to Validity
• How China is Securing Testing

If you’re attending the conference stop by our booth and visit. To learn more about the ATP conference click here.

Best regards,

Don Sorensen
Vice President, Marketing
Caveon Test Security

1 > Boy dressed as girl to cheat on exam - Pantagraph.com
Dressing as a girl to take a high school Regents exam in place of another student landed a 17-year-old upstate New York boy in some serious detention. Deandre Ellis, 17, of Schenectady was arrested on a felony charge after the incident Tuesday. City school officials said a monitor verifying that each student was taking the proper exam suspected something was amiss when the name on the test and the person taking it didn’t match.

2 > Possibility of Camden cheating on firefighter test investigated - Philadelphia Inquirer
The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office is investigating allegations that questions on a fire-captain exam circulated in a Camden firehouse around the time the test was given, fire officials said.

3 > China Focus: Hi-tech devices help national exams cheats - English Xinhua
BEIJING, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) — Hi-tech items, such as neatly disguised wireless transmitters, are becoming a headache for China’s exam proctors as exam sitters look for new ways to cheat on highly competitive national exams. The Beijing Radio Administration Bureau detected 16 cases of unidentified signals, indicating cheating in this year’s national exam for graduate study. Roughly 1.25 million sat the exam from Saturday to Monday,

4 > Concern over ‘cheats charter’ on Facebook - Click Liverpool
Education chiefs have slammed a Facebook webpage that offers a ‘charter for cheats’ by encouraging schoolchildren to swap their homework answers. “Let’s Cram” is a Facebook application that claims to help children study online and has just raised a massive 285,000 dollars of funding in America to expand the site.

5 > Chinese education officials deny graduate study exam content leaked - English Xinhua
China vowed Thursday to safeguard the integrity of its national higher education exams by imposing “severe” penalties against people who posted rumors and false reports online. A senior official with the Ministry of Education said that online rumors about exams for graduate study caused confusion among test-takers, of whom there were more than 1.25 million this year, and affected social stability.

6 > Boom in exam cheats battling for China’s top jobs - The Guardian
Growing competition for jobs in the Chinese civil service appears to have produced a boom in dishonesty, with about 1,000 cheats caught in the national entrance exams this year. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed graduates seek safe berths in government offices, but their desperation to succeed has led to the highest level of cheating on record, according to the China Daily newspaper.

7 > Education Sector to Tighten Test Discipline - Viet Nam News
HA NOI — University teachers will take part in overseeing the nationwide final high-school exams this year in an effort to tighten discipline and prevent cheating during the exams, according to a new report from the Ministry of Education and Training.