How the Online SAT May be Vulnerable to Cheating

Politics|The Online SAT Was Supposed to Avert Cheating. People Are Trying Anyway.

Three years ago, after nearly a century of testing on paper, the College Board rolled out a new digital SAT.

Students who had long relied on No. 2 pencils to take the exam would instead use their laptops. One advantage, the College Board said, was a reduced chance of cheating, in part because delivering the test online meant the questions would vary for each student.

Now, however, worries are growing that the College Board’s security isn’t fail safe. Fueling the concerns are what appear to be copies of recently administered digital SAT questions that have been posted on the internet — on social media sites as well as websites primarily housed in China.

The SAT leaks dominated the conversation in November at an international education conference in Seville, Spain, according to Angel B. Peréz, the head of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

“It was the talk of cocktail parties at the international high school conference,” Dr. Peréz said in an interview. “I had a few counselors come up to me to say, ‘we are very concerned.’”

The College Board was alerted to the cheating efforts by an SAT tutor, according to emails obtained by The New York Times. “This is not a matter of one compromised form. It is a multiyear breach of active test material, accessible on a global scale,” the tutor wrote to the College Board in November, according to the emails.