The Big Picture of Cheating
Written By: David Foster, CEO & Founder, Caveon Test Security
Today reports came out regarding the most recent senate hearing about the SAT proxy testing scandal in New York state. Several individuals from College Board, ACT and ETS, along with others from organizations with authentication methodologies and technologies, provided testimony at the hearing. Senator LaValle from New York expressed dismay at the apparent lax security surrounding these very important admissions exams and admonished the organizations to better protect the examination process so that the results could be trusted. The hearing focused on the taking of tests by others, and rightfully exposed the problems with using student ID’s, or even government-issued ID’s, as a method to authenticate a student prior to taking a college admissions exam. Several organizations described their products and services as “improved” methods of authentication.
One of the problems I see with the handling of this security breach, the extensive media attention regarding this breach, and even these hearings, is that they are myopic, ignoring other important security threats. (To be fair to the media, for the past couple of years there have been almost daily reports of other types of incidents of cheating in the US and across the world.) The implication is that solving this authentication problem will do away with the problem of cheating. While proxy test-taking is one way to cheat, there are dozens if not hundreds of others. Improving the authentication process will reduce the rate of proxy test-taking, but will do nothing for the other threats.
Before following this track too much farther, Senator LaValle and the organizations involved in this scandal should step back and help capture the big picture of cheating. What are the other threats? What risks do they pose and what damage have they caused and continue to cause to the value of testing, to society and to our educational system? How do we get a better measure of what is really happening? How do we deal with each threat individually? What can we do to impact the general cheating disease currently afflicting our country and the world? While I appreciate what the Senator is doing to try to correct this one problem, we need a more comprehensive approach. Getting a better view of the big cheating picture—as a starting point—should be our top priority.
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