So when I was asked to upload a photo of myself onto my Oct. SAT admissions ticket, I immediately became wary. Wary of what I couldn’t pin-point, but I felt uncomfortable with having my face plastered on that portentous ticket.
This fall, the College Board granted college admissions officers access to a database of student photographs as a part of a new security protocol intended to curb cheating, and, more specifically, impersonation on the SAT. College entrance exams now require students to submit a photograph upon registering for the tests, which are then printed on their admission tickets and verified on testing day.
The new protocol is in response to the arrests of 20 teenagers from five different schools in Nassau County in Long Island, NY. Five were suspected of taking tests for other students and the other 15 of paying them between $500 and $3,600 to falsely take the tests in their name.
Sam Eshaghoff was arrested in September of last year for taking the test multiple times for clients who paid upwards of $2,500 each.
Eshaghoff triggered the investment of millions of dollars in revamping the College Board’s security protocols designed to ensure that students’ testing is conducted fairly, but the testing impropriety goes far beyond Nassau County. Annually, the E.T.S.—the organization responsible for the development and administration of the exam—cancels thousands of scores by reason of believed copying, impersonating, or reportedly violating other rules.
During the 2010- 2011 academic year, E.T.S and the College Board conducted 9, 600 investigations of SAT test irregularities. Security measures are taken to assure integrity in the printing and shipping of test materials to nearly 7,000 test centers located in over 170 different countries.
Kathleen Steinburg, a spokesperson for the College Board, claims, “Making the registration data repository accessible to all score recipients is an important deterrent.”
But will implementing this new protocol truly deter the students who planned on cheating before the new security measure was taken? Wouldn’t it be a matter of simply uploading a photo of the impersonator to match easily manufactured fake IDs, such as those used by Eshaghoff?
It seems to me that if a student was willing to pay thousands of dollars for someone else to defraud the exam, avoiding an additional loop hole wouldn’t be of too much concern. In this attempt to discourage fraud on the exam, what did the E.T.S and the College Board truly accomplish?
While only time will tell whether the protocol was successful in avoiding testing misconduct, I can’t help but feel that the accessibility of a database of photo identification to admissions officials is opening a can of worms.
“I think any time personal information is systematically gathered and maintained by a third party, there are concerns,” said David Hawkins, the director of public policy and research of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling.
Studies have shown that the likelihood of an admissions office pursuing my profile on Facebook is slim, but the access of fewer eyes to my physical portrait gives me a sense of protection.
In the face of the overwhelming and intimidating college application process, I can’t help but feel somewhat vulnerable as a face among the millions of others in the College Board’s database.
