Edwin Carlson writes for the Washington Free Beacon about more dubious activity in communist China.
Chinese LSAT preparation companies have violated the security of remotely administered exams for years, allowing Chinese nationals to access stolen questions and take the place of qualified Americans, the CEO of a U.S. test preparation company told the Washington Free Beacon.
The CEO, Dave Killoran of PowerScore, revealed that a Chinese whistleblower, frustrated with how easy cheating on the LSAT appeared to be, contacted him in May of this year with what he claimed were stolen questions.
“After a review of those questions, I quickly determined they were actual LSAT questions,” Killoran said.
PowerScore and the Law School Admission Council (LSAC)—the body responsible for creating and administering the LSAT—are the only groups with legal access to test material still in use, Killoran explained. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, LSAC has allowed students to take the test remotely. In China, online testing has spawned an industry of companies that bypass LSAC’s “remote security measures,” allowing cheating agents to take the test from anywhere in the world by posing as students and using fake IDs.
While taking the remote exams, these agents take screenshots of questions. The screenshots end up being “compiled into PDFs and sold to students who can’t pay the high fees for a proxy test taker,” Killoran told the Free Beacon.
LSAC regularly reuses content from tests, meaning those Chinese students who cannot afford a proxy simply study the ill-gotten documents in the hope that the same questions will appear on their exams.
Killoran told the Free Beacon that to solve the problem, LSAC must stop online testing entirely until it can find a more permanent solution.
“If they take the necessary steps to completely stop the cheating, then the issue will go away quickly,” he said. “If they do not, the cheating will continue, and that becomes an existential threat to the use of the LSAT. If cheating continues and scores become unreliable, what’s the use of the LSAT in admissions?”
