if in fact you did nothing wrong.

this happening but it does (it did to someone when I was in high school). They audit the tests periodically to 'ensure' the validity of them. Take the test over is another option, but w/ more oversight. You're right, the options are not great.

accused of cheating because of their high math scores, so the whole class took the test again and did even better.

teacher was exceptional in teaching students math skills and the like, and students of course did great.

At Garfield, it took me five years to get to the truth of that one incident. Ten students agreed to sign waivers so the College Board could show me their exam papers. The calculus test was a distant memory, their lives were going well and I think they assumed that since their old teacher blessed my book project, I would reveal nothing that put them in a bad light. I thought my inspection of the exams would clear them.

Instead, I found that nine of the 10 had made identical silly mistakes on free-response question number 6. That could only mean at least eight had copied from the same source, perhaps the ninth person. I got two of them to admit that in a moment of panic near the end of the exam, somebody had passed around a piece of paper with that flawed solution.

Alone, generally, with direct proctors. It sucks, they presume you guilty. It hasn't gotten any better since "Stand & Deliver" happened.

SATs and ACTs are a scam.

Young men and women are given the opportunity to retake their SAT test so that they have the chance to improve their scores. So, when this young woman does just that, she's flagged? I'm bookmarking this story so I can follow it. Does anyone know if the folks at SAT know the names of the people who take the test? I ask that because if names are known by the testing company - is it possible that this woman's name - Kamilah - could have been flagged because it might have been assumed she was a person of color? Honestly, it is what came into my mind before I even clicked on the article to read it and when I saw Ms. Campbell was African American, it didn't surprise me. I'm jaded, I guess.

You need to record where every student is seated and you turn that seating chart in. If it's a high school administering it, they keep a copy and it has to be retained for years, but I think a copy gets forwarded to SAT central, wherever that is.

In case of anything squirrelly being picked up by the software, where "squirrelly" is going to be things that the software is programmed to look for--for example, maybe you retake the test and you score goes way up--then the software can check for correlation with others within easy visual distance. The info includes not just who was where and what they answered, but also what test "form" or version number they had.

I'm told the software also randomly picks students. I'd be really surprised if the software had a look-up table with student names and an instruction to make a special point of flagging African-American first names. (Note that this would be unnecessary, since the SAT form has, optionally, a bubble for race/ethnicity.)

Does the software know the students' names or race/ethnicity? What does it mean for software to "know" a fact?

Humans may get involved along the way at some point, but that might just be scanning or keying in the seating charts that the software says it needs to finish running its algorithms.

that sounds like a scandal in of itself--and NOT the kind of scandal that would give someone like Kamilah a leg up. More likely kids with rich and powerful parents.

I see it over and over at college confidential message boards.

A significant jump in performance can lead to a letter. I’m sure it’s frustating to deal with as a student but it’s what college board does. They’re very worried about potential cheating and the difference in scores is a trigger.

but the girl should at least be able to see the evidence...

It's a suspicious correlation, too many people scoring especially high or making too many of the same mistakes sitting in a specific area. Now, somebody will have to verify it. Pity the poor test coordinator. They're in a special kind of hell.

Thing is, when you take the private test pretty much every right you have is signed away, just to limit nuisance suits. Among the nuisance suits are real suits (nobody ever has anything but a real suit, of course). And given the nature of random distributions, in some instances what appears to be suspicious is just random. It's like some cancer hotspots around the US are just randomly concentrated cases. When there's a statistical hotspot, there must be a cause and we all go bonkers over it. When that cause only has an effect for a limited cohort, but shouldn't be that limited if there was a local cause, nobody notices. Except epidemiologists, but who cares about them when there's a investigative prize or documentary to make?

Problem, though: If a student next to her copied her SAT answers, you get similar results. Most honor codes I know don't distinguish between the cheater and "cheatee" because it's often too difficult to prove which direction information flows in. And nobody cares about intent, which is hard to say anything useful about--it's like "disparate impact" in the law, avoiding the entire intent mess. That's why the SAT stipulates that you keep your calculator at hand, and not share it; you keep your answer document flat on your desk at all times; that you put your answer document in your test booklet whenever you're taking a break, even at your own desk, and obligatorily during official breaks. You fold it, so only the page you're recording answers on is facing up, all the others are to be hidden. Students are to sit a minimum distance from each other. Nothing than can record or transmit data or images electronically is to be out at any time.

It's just too easy for a student to get up to go to the bathroom and leave their answers open on their desk; for a student to get up with a cell phone and snap a picture, then airdrop it. I've seen students sit there and look over their answers, holding their answer document up for all to see, or they pick it up and hold it next to their head to be able to have the entire test booklet open, unrestricted and uncluttered, on their little student desks. In fact, if somebody wanted to discretely snap a picture at that point, it would have been easy.

Yeah, the proctor's supposed to monitor. And the proctor's also supposed to record all kinds of information--several copies of seating charts, verify that everything as it's turned in is completed, sort and organize. There are lots of opportunities where the proctor's focus is someplace else, and likely to be there for a minute or more. It's worse if the test is administered in class, because the entire building might be waiting on you, and while nobody admits to pressuring you when the test coordinator is in the door asking if he can help you and what's taking so long, there's pressure.

There is always someone watching you!

Anyway, that was my experience when I took it. And all those taking it when I did were in cutthroat competition with one another to get into the top schools, so no one was going to help anybody else.