More money than brains - literally

[REWahoo]

Students arrested in SAT cheating scheme

Seven Long Island high school students allegedly paid up to $2,500 to have a college student impersonate them and take the college entrance exam.

 

[ziggy29]

Students arrested in SAT cheating scheme

[-]Seven Long Island high school students[/-] Wealthy parents allegedly paid up to $2,500 to have a college student impersonate them and take the college entrance exam.

Fixed.

 

[W2R]

The college student didn't even do all that well for that $2500, either. 2120 out of 2400? Pul-eeze.

 

[chinaco]

C grades with an SAT score of a genius... Temporary Genius through rent-a-brain!

Scores didn't match up with GPAs
High school faculty had become suspicious when they heard rumors of students paying a third party to take the SAT for them early this year, prosecutors said. They managed to nail down the six suspected high schoolers by comparing past academic performance to SAT scores of students who had taken the test at a different school.

 

[ziggy29]

Interesting how they catch this stuff. It reminded me of a chapter in Freakonomics when the authors describe how they caught teachers cheating for their students in standardized tests:

We develop an algorithm for detecting teacher cheating that combines information on
unexpected test score fluctuations and suspicious patterns of answers for students in a classroom.
Using data from the Chicago Public Schools, we estimate that serious cases of teacher or
administrator cheating on standardized tests occur in a minimum of 4-5 percent of elementary
school classrooms annually. The observed frequency of cheating appears to respond strongly to
relatively minor changes in incentives. Our results highlight the fact that high-powered incentive
systems, especially those with bright line rules, may induce unexpected behavioral distortions
such as cheating. Statistical analysis, however, may provide a means of detecting illicit acts,
despite the best attempts of perpetrators to keep them clandestine.