The rise of cheating has paralleled the increasingly large role testing plays in the American workplace.
The New York Times reports that over the last 15 years, hundreds of businesses and trade organizations have instituted formal certification programs to measure and verify employee skills, meaning that many working adults are still trudging to privately run testing centers, where most exams are administered, well into middle age.
Recently, the dangers of Internet-based cheating have become more apparent. The Boston Globe reported that tens of thousands of soldiers obtained answers to tests in a range of military skills from websites. The Army case was especially egregious, testing specialists said, because even modest measures that are widely used to prevent cheating weren't in place. The sheer number of Army cheaters also surprised some testing specialists.
"It's impacting any industry or any business that certifies or licenses," said Susan Underhill, vice president of Hewlett-Packard's global certification program.
People take risks to pass tests on which their livelihood depends.
Testing professionals criticized state and federal prosecutors for often refusing to pursue cheaters, arguing that cheating on professional exams costs millions of dollars and can risk lives.
The number of corporations and private-sector trade groups issuing certifications has exploded since the 1990s, according to industry observers, due in part to new government regulations. States require a growing number of trades and professions to pass licensing or certification tests.
"We are in a credentialing society," said Leon Smith, the president of Professional Examination Service, a nonprofit test association that promotes certifications as a public good. "If it moves, we develop a test and we test it."
At least 2 million exams are taken every year for information technology certifications alone, test officials said. Though the term IT may conjure up images of the office technician, testing officials note that it covers such sensitive areas as protecting defense installations and making sure that medical equipment works properly.
"We live in a world where IT supports everything," said Underhill, the executive in charge of Hewlett-Packard's certifications. She said that "67 percent of the world's money runs through an HP system every day." HP systems are also in many 911 call centers, she said. The Defense Department recently required that all its IT security workers become certified, and that all military contractors use certified security technicians, within five years.
Such certifications can add up to $35,000 to a computer engineer's annual salary, according to a 2007 survey in Certification Magazine.
But the rise in international certifications has also made cheating easier and more prevalent. Many of the copies of exams used for cheating come from developing nations, both because of lax security and some cultures that condone the sharing of exam answers. Randall T. Trask, a vice president at Pearson VUE, one of the largest test-administration firms, with 5,500 test
sites in 162 countries, said that the pressure on some test-takers in foreign countries is enormous, explaining why they resort to cheating. In some Asian cultures, specialists said, sharing test answers is considered collaborative learning.
Economic Espionage
Cheating in some Asian countries is so rampant that Microsoft no longer tries out new versions of exams in India, China, and Pakistan - countries that account for nearly half the world's population - after finding that answers to draft questions tried out in those countries were appearing online almost immediately, according to Shon Hong, a Microsoft security specialist.
The best way to prevent cheating is to make sure that no one can steal the tests. Once they become compromised, as happened with hundreds of Army exams, there is no fully effective way to prevent cheating without rewriting the questions.
At a recent test-industry conference in San Antonio, a Utah-based security firm presented a lineup of tools used to steal tests, including tiny button-hole cameras, a document scanner disguised as a pen, and digital watches with concealed cameras.
Susan Dorn, a lawyer in Washington who has represented nonprofit testing organizations, told groups that they have legal recourse under copyright law if cheaters sell exact duplicates of test answers.
However, some cheating sites have sought to shield themselves from lawsuits by calling their crib sheets "study guides" and altering the wording of questions just enough to avoid legal problems. Nonetheless, Microsoft has filed suits against dozens of providers of study guides available on the web.
Test administration officials said writing a scientifically rigorous test costs up to $1,000 per question. Microsoft, in court documents, said that each compromised exam had cost the company about $100,000.
Hoping to avoid the disruption and cost of compromised exam programs, testing groups have turned to security firms to monitor the Internet for stolen content. Some dispatch undercover officers to take tests at sites suspected of having lax security. The physical therapists' association, for example, spends about $50,000 per year on such measures, Lane said.
In some cases, however, increased security has clashed with the desire by exam sponsors to have their test available as widely as possible. Technology companies in particular have accepted lower levels of security in order to have testing centers in distant corners of the globe. Other groups, including the Army, have moved to administer their tests online, an approach that raises its own set of security concerns. Online testing proponents insist that having people take the tests on home computers can be efficient and reliably free of cheating, but organizations must be willing to pay for special types of programs to thwart cheaters.
Based on a story by the New York Times Company, 2008
Job exam piracy rising, Websites aid test cheating by professionals
By Alan Wirzbicki and Kevin Baron, Globe Correspondents | December 26, 2007
