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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Gaming the SATs

It’s led to endless nights of studying, stressing, pacing and cursing, and I don’t have enough negative things to say about the SAT and ACT exams.

If these standardized tests weren’t responsible for enough in high school, they’ve now led to the arrest of six students for participating in an underground cheating ring in Long Island, N.Y.

At least half a dozen students from Great Neck North High School paid college student Sam Eshaghoff, age 19, between $1,500 and $2,500 to take the test for them. Eshaghoff, a graduate of the school, which ranks 71st in Newsweek Daily Beast’s top 500 high schools, allegedly flew home from college just to take the SAT twice in the same weekend. 

After the school discovered those involved, Eshaghoff was arraigned on charges of scheming to defraud, criminal impersonation and falsifying business records, according to the New York Times. I don’t condone cheating, but I don’t condone these standardized tests, either.

While the ACT is a content-based test and the SAT focuses more on critical thinking and problem solving both are worthless exams that fail to reflect a student’s true academic capability, not to mention the multi-million dollar industry that benefits from students’ fear of failing. 

The Princeton Review guarantees a student can raise their score 200 points by attending one of their classes, but that costs a thousand bucks. The standardized test industry is like a cruel sugar daddy; it takes and takes, guaranteeing results, and then slaps you so hard across the face you don’t know what to do but come back crying for more.

Eshaghoff was clearly trying to get in on some of that profit. Given the already impossible and, more importantly, inequitable nature of the exam, a little more corruption here and there doesn’t seem so bad.

Indeed, students who can’t afford tutoring are disadvantaged even before they sit down to take the test. Allowing students to compete with one another for a better score when there is a definite divide in terms of financial resources is wrong. 

More so, the test has since reached its peak of pointlessness. As of March 2011, the SAT asked students to answer a prompt on reality television. This outdated test is obviously attempting to keep up with the times, but what’s the point?

If persuasive essays on reality television are what college boards deem necessary knowledge, then we’ve got bigger problems. Schools like Drew University in Madison, N.J., offer an SAT-optional policy, allowing students to submit a graded paper rather than the results of their standardized test. 

A forward-thinking school like this understands that some students don’t necessarily thrive when asked to write an inspiring essay under the gun, and other schools are following suit.


Columbia College and Lakeforest College in Illinois have both implemented similar policies along with hundreds of other schools who have deemphasized the use of standardized tests. Put simply, these exams cannot measure a student’s worthiness and academic capacity.

As for Eshaghoff, he plans to plead not guilty. In a small sense, he’s not.

It seems wrong to throw the book at a student for fraud when he was clearly inspired by the already unethical foundation of the standardized test industry.

­— esalomon@indiana.edu

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