Accused of Cheating On Your SAT or ACT

Can You Be Accused Of Cheating

If You Show Significant Improvement

on Your SAT or ACT?

Who would ever think that a student could be punished for their hard work? But the sad truth is that it happens. Most students do not even consider the possibility that they will be accused of cheating on a standardized test because they performed so well. But this situation does occur.

Yes it is in fact true. The College Board has accused students of cheating on their SAT based only on their score increases from one SAT to the next (or from a student’s PSAT to his/her SAT).

If you are accused of cheating on the SAT, the College Board will most likely cancel your scores and ask you to retake the test in a private setting.

Now nobody likes being accused of cheating, and nobody wants to retake a four hour exam. But that’s not even the worst part. By the time you are asked to retake the test it may have been a long while since you last prepared for the exam. You may not do as well simply because you are out of practice. You thought that this long, arduous test was finally over and now you have to go through the whole process again.

And by the way, this is not unique to the SAT. This happens with the ACT as well. I actually had a student that was already in college on a scholarship while the ACT was threatening to cancel her scores. The case went into arbitration. If the ACT had won, the student would have had to pay back all of her scholarship money. As the student’s ACT tutor I had to testify in her defense.

How can you protect yourself?

Well if you have spent a lot of time preparing properly for the SAT (or ACT) and you expect your score to go up several hundred points from the last time you took the test, you may want to take the following two precautions:

(1) Show additional work in your test booklet even if you do not need to.

(2) Try to be certain of your answers before you bubble them in so you do not produce too many erasure marks.

Yes I do realize that the test makers are not supposed to be looking at your work in your test booklet, and I also realize that there is not supposed to be a penalty for changing your answers after checking them over. But these two key pieces of “evidence” can be used against you in a hearing. Indeed, they have been used as evidence of cheating by prosecutors in the past.

Also, if you take the above two precautions, it is less likely that you will be accused of cheating to begin with. An extremely large score increase will possibly set off a flag that the test makers will want to investigate. But they may not immediately accuse you of cheating before looking over your results carefully. If they are convinced from your test booklet that you knew what you were doing, then you will most likely be left alone.

By the way, if you happen to use my test prep materials, you will probably notice that for many problems you do not need to show much work in your test booklet at all. Many of the techniques I teach are designed to solve problems very quickly and with little to no writing. Nonetheless, if you feel like your score is going to improve several hundred points from your last test, please show some work in your test booklet anyway.

One might then ask “Does spending extra time writing in the test booklet negate the positive effects of using my time-saving strategies to begin with?”

My answer is “no.” First of all, the advice in this article is only for students that believe they will go up at least 400 total points from their last SAT (by total points, I mean 400 points across all three sections – math, reading and writing). Second, if you happen to be one of these students, then your skill level has improved so much that it should not affect your score at all to scribble a little extra work in your test booklet.

So please continue to prepare, and do the best that you can when you take your test, but be a little extra cautious if you are expecting a very large score increase.

For your everyday preparation, you may want to take a look at the following books for the SAT and ACT.