GMAT Cheating Controversy Grows

The number of students caught up is now more than 6,000, and the testing company talks about who could have their scores canceled

by Louis Lavelle

A cheating scandal that has engulfed the B-school world grew vastly larger on June 27, when the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) said the number of prospective MBA students facing questions about their entrance exams now totals more than 6,000—six times the original estimate.

At the same time, GMAC tried to reassure the involved students that only those who knowingly used the Scoretop.com Web site to cheat on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) will have their scores canceled. Because most top B-schools require the GMAT, the students' MBA dreams could be shattered.

The scandal erupted on June 23, when GMAC disclosed (BusinessWeek.com, 6/23/08) it had won a legal judgment against the Scoretop site in federal district court in Virginia. GMAC had accused Scoretop of copyright infringement, saying the site had published "live" GMAT questions—questions that were still currently in use by GMAC, the test's publisher—and other copyrighted material. The court awarded GMAC $2.3 million plus legal costs, and allowed GMAC to seize Scoretop's domain name as well as a computer hard drive containing payment and other data.

For prospective MBA students who used the Scoretop site to prepare for the GMAT, the news was devastating. GMAC is analyzing the hard drive and it vowed to cancel the scores of anyone who used the site to cheat on the exam, prohibit them from retaking the test, and notify the schools that received the tainted scores. That could mean rejection for applicants, expulsion for current students, and unspecified sanctions for graduates. "I am extremely stressed out," one GMAT test-taker who used the Scoretop site wrote in a comment to BusinessWeek.com's original story about the scandal. "I am so upset and worried right now."

GMAC said June 27 it is working to put together a list of advice and frequently asked questions concerning the controversy. It is likely to be available on the company's Web site next week.

Schools Weigh How to Respond

Meanwhile, GMAC says the man behind Scoretop, Lei Shi, has left the site's base in Aurora, Ohio, and returned to his native China, where he reportedly has taken refuge in the city of Zibo in Shandong province. Shi, who took the GMAT himself at least three times in 2002 and 2003, could not be reached June 27, and was not represented in court on the copyright infringement case.

Deans, MBA program heads, and admission directors at individual B-schools are scrambling to figure out how they will respond when GMAC begins canceling scores. Joe Fox, the head of the MBA programs at Washington University's Olin Business School, has said a lot depends on how much information is available about each student's use of the site, but the school will take any allegations seriously, adding that expulsion for current students is a possibility. In his blog, the dean of University of Virginia's Darden School, Robert Bruner, said Darden and its peer schools "will brook absolutely no cheating."

Stacey Kole, deputy dean for the full-time MBA program at the University of Chicago, says a lack of hard evidence implicating someone in actual cheating will make the decision-making process difficult. "Without hard evidence, it's very hard to say you're going to throw someone out," she says. "We don't have a problem taking action when we know someone has cheated. I have a tough time taking action when I don't know."

"Live" Questions

The GMAT, which is used by more than 4,000 graduate management programs worldwide and has been administered more than 200,000 times, is a computer-adaptive exam. By assembling a new test for every test-taker from a pool of several thousand questions, it virtually guarantees nobody gets the same test twice, or the same test as the person sitting at the next computer terminal.