Saratoga News

SHS students can retake 'contaminated' AP quiz

By Michelle Alaimo

Educational Testing Service has offered all 70 Saratoga High School students who took the Advanced Placement History test on May 9 an opportunity to retake the exam for free, ask for a full refund or have only the multiple-choice questions on the original test count toward their score.

Educational Testing Service's standard procedure is to allow students to retake the test when a test has been "contaminated" by cheaters, said Kevin Gonzalez, ETS spokesman.

No date has been set for the retest, but a letter has been mailed to the students' parents explaining the options.

The cheating scenario began during a pretest study breakfast in which one student revealed four of the five essay questions to the group. According to various sources, some students who heard the questions announced were stunned, others walked out of the room and some opened their books and began studying.

The student sharing test information, a junior, received the essay questions from a friend who had taken the exam at an American school in Singapore, which is in an earlier time zone. The friend was expelled, and the Saratoga High School junior was suspended for five days.

"I know this punishment doesn't follow the cheating policy, but it was different because what I did affected a lot of people. I can understand it," the student said in an interview with high school's newspaper.

SHS Principal Kevin Skelly declined to say whether he agreed or disagreed with ETS's standard policy.

"I think the students were thrust into a real difficult situation," Skelly said. "We are trying to turn a bad situation into a learning one. That is what school is all about."

When it was discovered by school officials that cheating had taken place, ETS was notified, and all the test scores from SHS were put on hold. Students must now decide which of the options to take. Skelly said the school's position is that if, after the questions were announced, "you opened your book or studied for the test, then you cheated, and should ask for a refund." ETS will pick up the tab for those students who decide to take the test again, Gonzalez said.

Skelly and Gonzalez declined to comment on whether the student responsible for the incident will be allowed to retake the test.

ETS has no plans to change its testing procedure so that this type of incident does not happen again. Gonzalez said that ETS tries its best to scramble test forms and that cheating is rare, but time zone cheating does happen occasionally.

The cheating incident has sparked further discussion on ethics. Last Thursday, the Rev. Thomas Shanks from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University came to the high school and facilitated a discussion about ethics. Shanks held a morning session with the AP history class to talk about what students could learn from this incident. The students and Shanks also discussed how to recognize a moral situation and how to make a good decision.

Shanks held an evening session with parents to explain how to develop a common language and the tools to discuss ethical and moral situations with kids.

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