Has teaching become a profession for dummies? Many SAT high-scorers would like to teach, but apparently most of them want salaries commensurate with their scores. My plan requires only 25% of teachers to be high scorers in order to give every child the benefit of an above-average teacher. It wouldn't result in any increased costs. And weak teachers wouldn't need to be fired, because everyone's skills would be used to maximum benefit. Impossible? See how I did the math HERE and HERE.
"Significantly lagging behind were students hoping to major in three of the most popular fields -- education (1442)..."
"Students wishing to major in multi/interdisciplinary studies earned the highest combined SAT score (1757)."
High school students' SAT scores continue to slip
Lynn O'Shaughnessy
CBS News
MoneyWatch
September 26, 2013
(MoneyWatch) The latest SAT test figures released today by the College Board suggest that most freshmen aren't academically prepared for college.
High school seniors who graduated earlier this year generated the exact same scores as last year's crop of test takers. The latest results continue a pattern of stagnating test scores that educators have lamented for years.
The 2013 figures suggest that only 43 percent of SAT takers among this year's freshmen are ready for the academic rigors of college studies.
The average high school senior earned a 496 on the critical reading portion of the test and a 514 on the math section (The highest score possible for each of these sections is 800). Students fared the worst in the writing section, with an average score of 488. While the average composite score of 1498 out of a possible 2400 is identical with last year's result, it's 20 points lower than in 2006, when the SAT writing section was introduced.
Who is ready for college
Students who earn a 1550 on the test, according to the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark, have a 65 percent probability of earning a first-year GPA of a B minus or higher. Most of the students who meet the readiness benchmark (78 percent) are enrolled in four-year institutions.
David Coleman, the College Board's president, said the latest batch of stagnant scores represents a "call to action."
"We must dramatically increase the number of students in K-12 who are prepared for college and careers," he said in a statement. "Only by transforming the daily work that students do can we achieve excellence and equity."
That's easier said than done. FairTest.org, which is an opponent of the SAT and state-level programs that focus on K-12 testing, compiled this chart showing how much SAT scores have slipped since 2006:
Students planning to major in some of the liberal arts and sciences performed significantly better than many who are aiming at more vocationally oriented degrees. Students wishing to major in multi/interdisciplinary studies earned the highest combined SAT score (1757), followed by the physical sciences (1673), English language and literature (1665), and social sciences (1661).
Significantly lagging behind were students hoping to major in three of the most popular fields -- education (1442), psychology (1484), and business management and marketing (1497). Some of the lowest scores came from students wanting to major in parks and recreation (1328) and construction trades (1274).
Showing posts with label SAT test. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SAT test. Show all posts
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
Middle class and poor kids are scoring lower on tests than in the past compared to rich kids
Our society discards the potential contributions of gifted poor kids in order to keep the children of rich and middle class families in top positions. The rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago. This statistic has nothing to do with race.
Obviously, this situation does not benefit our country since it puts less competent people in charge of progress. Nor does it benefit the planet, since our society is so powerful.
No Rich Child Left Behind
By SEAN F. REARDON
New York Times
April 27, 2013
...What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.
These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.
Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.
The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.
The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.
It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.
There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.
But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.
High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.
With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.
It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.
We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.
Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.
But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.
It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.
Obviously, this situation does not benefit our country since it puts less competent people in charge of progress. Nor does it benefit the planet, since our society is so powerful.
No Rich Child Left Behind
By SEAN F. REARDON
New York Times
April 27, 2013
...What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.
These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.
Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.
The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.
The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.
It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.
There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.
But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.
High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.
With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.
It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.
We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.
Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.
But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.
It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
20 Students Now Accused in L.I. Case: cheating on SAT test
I always wondered how George W. Bush got such a high SAT score. Listening to him talk, I just wasn't seeing the level of brain power required to achieve the scores. Suddenly I have a suspicion as to how he might have done it.
"The arrests on Tuesday included three people accused of accepting payment to take tests and eight who the authorities say paid impersonators to take tests for them." I also notice that one student is from Roslyn High School, where administrators were found to have embezzled funds a few years ago.
20 Students Now Accused in L.I. Case on Cheating
By JENNY ANDERSON and WINNIE HU
New York Times
November 22, 2011
MINEOLA, N.Y. — Schools do not write the SAT or administer it. But when school officials at Great Neck North High School suspected that students were cheating on the exam, their investigation led prosecutors down a trail that has resulted in criminal charges against 20 students and calls for widespread test reform.
Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North, said he believed cheating was pervasive. “I think it’s widespread across the country,” he said Tuesday. “We were the school that stood up to it.”
On Tuesday, Nassau County prosecutors accused 13 students from five schools of accepting payment or paying others to take the SAT and ACT between 2008 and 2011. Eleven students turned themselves in; two are expected to do so next week, prosecutors said.
The arrests, coming two months after seven other Nassau students were accused of cheating on the tests, seemed to underscore the district attorney’s assertion that security measures for the tests, administered by ACT Inc. and the Educational Testing Service, are inadequate, leading to widespread cheating.
“When this cheating scandal was first reported, E.T.S. said that this was an isolated incident, and that the SAT was secure,” Kathleen M. Rice, the Nassau County district attorney, said in a news conference. “I’m glad to know, now, that E.T.S. appreciates that this is a larger problem.”
The investigation began when administrators at Great Neck North looked into student rumors. Their focus soon fell on students who had registered to take the tests outside the district, and those whose scores and grades showed a disparity. They turned over the details to prosecutors, who opened a broad examination.
In September, prosecutors accused Sam Eshaghoff, 19, of impersonating six students, including a girl, to take tests for them. Officials allege that students paid Mr. Eshaghoff up to $3,500 per test for scores ranking as high as the 97th percentile. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The arrests on Tuesday included three people accused of accepting payment to take tests and eight who the authorities say paid impersonators to take tests for them. One student has declined to surrender.
Those accused of fraudulently taking tests face felony charges of scheming to defraud, as well as misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records and criminal impersonation.
Among those charged with taking the tests for others on Tuesday were Joshua Chefec, 20, now a senior at Tulane, and Michael Pomerantz, 18, both of whom attended Great Neck North; Adam Justin, 19, a graduate of North Shore Hebrew Academy and a student at Indiana University; and George Trane, 19, a graduate of Great Neck South who now attends SUNY Stony Brook. Officials said Mr. Pomerantz, citing a medical condition, told them he would surrender Monday; the others turned themselves in Tuesday morning.
Of the students charged with paying to have the test taken for them, five were from Great Neck North, two from North Shore Hebrew Academy High School and one from Roslyn High School.
Because those accused of paying test takers were 19 or under and face only misdemeanor charges, their identities will be not be made public, a spokesman for Ms. Rice said.
Matin Emanou, Mr. Eshaghoff’s lawyer, as well as the lawyers representing the latest students arrested, have argued that their clients are not guilty, and that the situation should be handled by the schools, not in the courts.
“While no one condones cheating, we have a school system that is separate and apart from the criminal justice system, and we have that for good reason,” said Brian Griffin, a Nassau County lawyer representing Mr. Chefec, who was accused of taking the test for others. Mr. Griffin said his client was not part of a “ring,” but was rather accused of having taken two tests for one student.
“It’s not a systematic scheme to defraud when you’re alleged to have acted with one person,” he said.
Gerard McCloskey, a Nassau lawyer who represents a student charged with paying someone to take the test and is still in high school, said, “My feeling is that it should be handled administratively by the College Board and the school board, not criminally, especially when the county is experiencing budget issues and resources are limited to begin with.” The College Board owns the SAT...
"The arrests on Tuesday included three people accused of accepting payment to take tests and eight who the authorities say paid impersonators to take tests for them." I also notice that one student is from Roslyn High School, where administrators were found to have embezzled funds a few years ago.
20 Students Now Accused in L.I. Case on Cheating
By JENNY ANDERSON and WINNIE HU
New York Times
November 22, 2011
MINEOLA, N.Y. — Schools do not write the SAT or administer it. But when school officials at Great Neck North High School suspected that students were cheating on the exam, their investigation led prosecutors down a trail that has resulted in criminal charges against 20 students and calls for widespread test reform.
Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North, said he believed cheating was pervasive. “I think it’s widespread across the country,” he said Tuesday. “We were the school that stood up to it.”
On Tuesday, Nassau County prosecutors accused 13 students from five schools of accepting payment or paying others to take the SAT and ACT between 2008 and 2011. Eleven students turned themselves in; two are expected to do so next week, prosecutors said.
The arrests, coming two months after seven other Nassau students were accused of cheating on the tests, seemed to underscore the district attorney’s assertion that security measures for the tests, administered by ACT Inc. and the Educational Testing Service, are inadequate, leading to widespread cheating.
“When this cheating scandal was first reported, E.T.S. said that this was an isolated incident, and that the SAT was secure,” Kathleen M. Rice, the Nassau County district attorney, said in a news conference. “I’m glad to know, now, that E.T.S. appreciates that this is a larger problem.”
The investigation began when administrators at Great Neck North looked into student rumors. Their focus soon fell on students who had registered to take the tests outside the district, and those whose scores and grades showed a disparity. They turned over the details to prosecutors, who opened a broad examination.
In September, prosecutors accused Sam Eshaghoff, 19, of impersonating six students, including a girl, to take tests for them. Officials allege that students paid Mr. Eshaghoff up to $3,500 per test for scores ranking as high as the 97th percentile. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The arrests on Tuesday included three people accused of accepting payment to take tests and eight who the authorities say paid impersonators to take tests for them. One student has declined to surrender.
Those accused of fraudulently taking tests face felony charges of scheming to defraud, as well as misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records and criminal impersonation.
Among those charged with taking the tests for others on Tuesday were Joshua Chefec, 20, now a senior at Tulane, and Michael Pomerantz, 18, both of whom attended Great Neck North; Adam Justin, 19, a graduate of North Shore Hebrew Academy and a student at Indiana University; and George Trane, 19, a graduate of Great Neck South who now attends SUNY Stony Brook. Officials said Mr. Pomerantz, citing a medical condition, told them he would surrender Monday; the others turned themselves in Tuesday morning.
Of the students charged with paying to have the test taken for them, five were from Great Neck North, two from North Shore Hebrew Academy High School and one from Roslyn High School.
Because those accused of paying test takers were 19 or under and face only misdemeanor charges, their identities will be not be made public, a spokesman for Ms. Rice said.
Matin Emanou, Mr. Eshaghoff’s lawyer, as well as the lawyers representing the latest students arrested, have argued that their clients are not guilty, and that the situation should be handled by the schools, not in the courts.
“While no one condones cheating, we have a school system that is separate and apart from the criminal justice system, and we have that for good reason,” said Brian Griffin, a Nassau County lawyer representing Mr. Chefec, who was accused of taking the test for others. Mr. Griffin said his client was not part of a “ring,” but was rather accused of having taken two tests for one student.
“It’s not a systematic scheme to defraud when you’re alleged to have acted with one person,” he said.
Gerard McCloskey, a Nassau lawyer who represents a student charged with paying someone to take the test and is still in high school, said, “My feeling is that it should be handled administratively by the College Board and the school board, not criminally, especially when the county is experiencing budget issues and resources are limited to begin with.” The College Board owns the SAT...
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