Education

GMAT cheating worries US colleges

By Lara Farrar and Zhao Yanrong (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-17 11:07

US universities are concerned about Chinese students' cheating on entrance exams across the country, according to experts.

"Anything from China is suspect in the United States now in the education realm," said Steven Dickinson, a China-based lawyer and former law professor at the University of Washington who worked with the school's admissions office to select international candidates.

The problem stems not necessarily from the students themselves but rather from the resources Chinese rely on to study for admissions tests, like the Graduate Record Examinations and the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT).

In 2008, 98,510 Chinese students went to study in the US, growing 21 percent over 2007, a report by the Institute of International Education said. China was the second largest source of foreign students in the US after India.

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which distributes the GMAT exam, sued Passion for copyright infringement after it posted "live" test questions from GMAT exams online and distributed PDFs from test books.

A Beijing court ordered Beijing Passion Consultancy Ltd on Nov 23 to pay a fine of 520,000 yuan for copyright infringement and publicly apologize for its actions.

Passion, a company that has trained around one third of Chinese students applying to the top 10 American business schools, said on Tuesday that it was sorry for selling GMAT materials without authorization.

After testing materials were removed, the traffic of Passion's website dropped by 70 percent in the past week, according to Internet traffic monitoring website Alexa.com.

Chinese students frequent a number of websites that reportedly hire staff to pose as test-takers and post reconstructed "live" questions from the exams for free online. Some of the proxy test-takers have employed hi-tech gadgets, including cameras and microphones, to obtain exam material.

"They will hire people to take the test and then steal the test book," Dickinson said. "Or they will get even more nasty and get an insider to send the text book that is coming out next and then get the answers to certain tests."

Even with GMAC's litigation against Passion, many other test-prep websites exist providing materials to Chinese students facing stiff competition to get into foreign schools.

(China Daily 12/17/2009 page25)