Affluent students cheat on SAT
<p>AP Photo/Newsday, Howard Schnapp Joshua Chefec, left, Adam Justin, background center, and George Trane, right, are escorted from of the Nassau District Attorney's office, in Mineola, N.Y., on Tuesday. Thirteen more current and former high school students from Great Neck, on New York's Long Island, were charged Tuesday in a widening college entrance exam cheating scandal, bringing the total to 20.</p>
GREAT NECK, N.Y. (AP) - At least 20 current or former high school students from an affluent New York suburb of high achievers have been charged in a widening college entrance exam cheating scandal that has raised questions not only about test security but about the pressures to score well.
Thirteen students from the Great Neck area, a cluster of Long Island communities with top-ranked schools that send virtually all their graduates to college, were implicated in the latest round of charges, filed Tuesday. Seven others were arrested in September.
Prosecutors said 15 high school students hired five other people for anywhere from $500 to $3,600 each to take the SAT or ACT for them. The impostors - all of them college students who attended Great Neck-area public and private high schools - fooled test administrators by showing up for the exams with phony ID.
"Honest, hardworking students are taking a back seat to the cheaters," Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said. "This is a system begging for security enhancements."
Prosecutors actually suspect 40 students were involved in the cheating, but the two-year statute of limitation had expired for the others, Rice said.
All the defendants but three, who were awaiting arraignment, pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors and others questioned the effectiveness of test security when it was revealed in September that a young man arrested in the scheme allegedly took the exam for a teenage girl.
The students who hired ringers registered to take the exam at different high schools from the ones they attended, so their teachers would not realize what was going on.
They are not being identified because they are being prosecuted as juveniles. They were charged with misdemeanors.
Among the new defendants, those accused of taking the test for money were Joshua Chefec, 20; Adam Justin, 19; Michael Pomerantz, 18; and George Trane, 19. Justin attends Indiana University; Chefec goes to Tulane University; and Trane is at Stony Brook University.
Chefec, Justin and Trane surrendered Tuesday and were charged with scheming to defraud, falsifying business records and criminal impersonation. They each face up to four years in prison if convicted. Pomerantz is expected to turn himself in next week.