The Perfect Score

Sociologists argue that the upsurge in school dishonesty also reflects attitudes in the culture at large, where cheating has become acceptable and even admired. International tycoons make enviable fortunes through market manipulation and fraud: think Enron, WorldCom and Martha Stewart. Scientists like South Korea's once revered stem-cell research pioneer, Hwang Woo Suk, fake lab results. In a recent poll of 25,000 high-schoolers by the California-based Josephson Institute of Ethics, nearly half agreed with the statement "A person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed." In Australia, a new study from Griffith University of students at four major campuses revealed that 40 percent believe faking research results is a "minor" offense. "Students feel like it's just no longer a big deal to cheat," says Don McCabe, the founder of Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity.

The problem is so pervasive that it's reshaping the face of academic admissions. In the future, exams from the SAT to the MCAT to the A-levels will be administered in secure rooms equipped with metal detectors, radio-frequency locators to check if students are receiving text-messaged answers on their mobile phones and, in China and South Korea at least, the threat of up to seven-year prison sentences for cheats. This year the world's most respected graduate entrance test, the GRE, which is taken by half a million students annually, is undergoing the biggest face-lift in its 55-year history. Starting this October, exam questions will be changed from test to test. Start times will be staggered across the globe so students in Los Angeles can't post memorized or photographed test sheets on the Web for students in Hong Kong. "We've basically revolutionized the way we're administering our high-stakes tests," says Ray Nicosia, director of security for the world's largest test administrator, the Princeton, New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service, which runs 25,000 test centers in 192 countries. "We're changing to combat this problem."

America's med-school en-trance exam, the MCAT, is stepping up security measures using biometrics. As of next year, would-be doctors will have to give electronic fingerprints and submit to digital photographs, making it easier for exam boards to catch cheaters who pay others to take the tests for them. The SAT last year added a writing section which, says Nicosia, provides a "substantive handwriting exemplar" to authenticate test takers. South Korea's Ministry of Education has introduced metal detectors for bathroom visits. In India, testing bodies have limited the number of administrators with early access to the exams.

European exams like Britain's GCSE and A-levels and France's baccalaureate are arming themselves with plagiarism-spotting software, like TurnItIn.com and MyDropBox.com, which compare student papers with everything available on the Internet and highlight copied sections in bright red. Some top institutions in the United States and Europe have even "legalized cheating." They now allow students to surf the Web on PDAs and laptops during "open Internet" exams. Proponents argue that this helps students learn research skills more applicable to real-life work situations, where information is freely available.

At the same time, a growing number of top universities are reducing their emphasis on standardized tests. Many are even beginning to throw them out altogether in favor of interviews and recommendations--markers of aptitude that can't be faked. The rising incidence of scoring errors has only heightened their concerns; just two weeks ago the U.S. College Board revealed that some 4,000 scores from last October's SAT had been miscalculated--some by as much as 400 points. "I do see a rise in alternative ways to augment the scores," says Gary Natriello, an education professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. "People are looking for those other signs that a student has a lot of potential."

Will standardized tests ever become obsolete? According to the Massachusetts-based National Center for Fair & Open Testing, some 730 American colleges no longer require undergrad applicants to take either the SAT or the ACT. In Britain, Oxford and Cambridge used to interview top candidates once; now final decisions are made after two interviews. Marlyn McGrath Lewis, the director of admissions for Harvard College, says more and more universities are adopting a "holistic approach to admissions"--and that's essential. "The quality of [the class] depends on it." Not to mention the quality of the education.

With Jason Overdorf in Delhi and Jonathan Adams in Taipei

© 2006