Students, teachers claim cheating in ACT program

SHANGHAI/SEOUL/IOWA CITY - For many Chinese high school students hoping to get into a U.S. university, the pitch is hard to resist.

Take English-language courses in China in a program recognized by admissions offices at more than 60 colleges in the United States - including state universities in Iowa as well as in New York, Michigan and Missouri.

Prepare for the ACT, America's most popular college entrance exam.

And take it in mainland China, instead of traveling elsewhere as other Chinese students must.

The program, known as the Global Assessment Certificate, also offers some students an advantage that isn't advertised: At three different GAC centers, school officials and proctors ignored and were sometimes complicit in student cheating on the ACT, according to seven students interviewed by Reuters.

The GAC program, which can cost students $10,000 a year or more, has emerged as one of many avenues in Asia used to exploit weaknesses in the U.S. college admissions process.

But the most remarkable aspect of this program is that the ACT itself owns and oversees it.

The GAC program is operated by a foreign subsidiary of ACT Inc., the Iowa City-based not-for-profit that administers the crucial college entrance exam. The subsidiary, ACT Education Solutions Ltd, is headquartered in Hong Kong.

The curriculum at GAC centers is designed to teach non-native English speakers reading, writing and other skills for college. The program has about 5,000 students in 11 countries at 197 centers.

Three-quarters of the centers are in mainland China. The vast majority of GAC students take the ACT, which American colleges use to assess applicants.

Some GAC centers advertise their students' high ACT scores and success getting into U.S. colleges. The website for one center - Zhengzhou Cornerstone High School in Zhengzhou, China - features pictures of accomplished graduates alongside their near-perfect test scores and the U.S. schools that accepted them.

The website for the GAC program promises universities 'highly skilled international students,” and some schools award college credit for classes taken at GAC centers.

But interviews with some students who attended GAC centers call the program's integrity into question. One now attending the University of California, Los Angeles, said a GAC administrator in China let him practice answering almost half the questions that would appear on the actual ACT about a week before the exam was given.

Another student, now at a major university in the Midwest, said his Chinese center provided students with two articles that appeared on an ACT he later took there.

Teachers speak out

What's more, eight teachers or administrators who have worked at seven different Chinese GAC centers described cheating in program courses. Some said it was widespread. They said students turned in assignments that were plagiarized.

At two different centers, former teachers said, officials encouraged them to give students exam questions and sometimes even answers in advance to ensure that they passed.

Jason Thieman resigned in January after nearly five months as a teacher at the GAC center at Jimei University in the southern Chinese city of Xiamen. He said he left after students complained that he was cracking down on cheating and plagiarism.

'If every university admissions office that accepted GAC students knew about what was going on with the GAC, and especially with the ACT, I think they wouldn't want to accept the students anymore,” Thieman said. 'It's outrageous.”

A spokesman for the GAC center said the program would never condone cheating and that students simply didn't like Thieman's teaching style.

Thieman is now in the United States, pursuing a doctorate in physics.

'The situation's not fair to anybody,” he said of the GAC program. 'It's not fair to the universities that admit” the students, and 'it's not fair to American students who actually have the proper standards in place when they take” the ACT.

Christopher Bogen, director of studies at a GAC center in Zhuhai from 2011 to 2014, said some of his students repeatedly engaged in 'intentional, flagrant cheating.” Some submitted essays that were supposed to be written in English. Instead, the essays had been translated using the Google Translate web tool, he said.

The GAC curriculum made cheating easier because the same tests were given 'over and over again,” Bogen said. Some of those tests and other GAC assignments were available for sale online in China, Reuters found.

No one from the GAC center where Bogen taught could be reached for comment.

Computerized versions

ACT spokesman Ed Colby said its Hong Kong subsidiary is responsible for handling cases of alleged cheating in GAC courses. He declined to make managers there available to speak for this article.

Colby said the subsidiary thoroughly vets GAC operators and monitors their work. ACT's head of test security, Rachel Schoenig, said the organization had canceled suspicious ACT scores of GAC students.

'From a test security perspective …

we have taken many, many steps to address the ACT testing activities of the GAC centers,” Schoenig said.

To guard against test leaks more broadly, she said, the organization has begun shipping the ACT in lock boxes to some overseas test centers. This month, ACT announced that, to combat cheating, it planned to introduce a computerized version of the ACT for overseas test-takers in the fall of 2017.

As with other standardized testing companies, ACT Inc is battling an 'emerging trend of organized fraud rings …

who, for a lot of money, a lot of their own personal gain, are seeking to undermine the system for honest test-takers,” Schoenig said.

The problems with the GAC program are not the work of outsiders, however. They are occurring within a system controlled and policed by the ACT organization itself.

Reuters identified six GAC centers that violate the ACT's own conflict-of-interest policy. The six centers administered the ACT while also offering commercial test-prep classes aimed at helping students score well on the college entrance exam.

ACT policy prohibits test-prep businesses from administering the exam because doing so would give them an unparalleled ability to help their clients by leaking them the test.

At those locations - five in mainland China and one in South Korea - GAC operators had access to exam booklets days or weeks before the ACT was given.

Colleges express shock

Several U.S. colleges said they were alarmed by what Reuters discovered. They are among the 60-plus 'pathway” schools that consider completion of the GAC program in their admissions decisions and sometimes award college credit for courses taken at GAC centers.

The reports of cheating are 'very disconcerting,” said Timothy Tesar, assistant director of international admissions at Iowa State University in Ames.

The university has enrolled 132 GAC students since 2009.

The cheating allegations are 'shocking to me,” said Jonnathan De La Fuente, international admissions counselor at University of Michigan-Flint. De La Fuente estimated that the university has enrolled 15 to 20 GAC students to date, almost all from South Korea. Michigan-Flint gives college credit for GAC coursework.

'If those reports are true, we have to, as a university, look into it,” he said. 'I'm wondering if those grades are even legitimate.”

ACT chief executive Marten Roorda was unavailable to answer questions for this story, spokesman Colby said.

Evidence of academic fraud among foreign students is mounting as American colleges enroll record numbers of applicants from abroad. Foreign students typically pay full tuition, a boon for U.S. schools.

These applicants also are emerging as sources of profit for the testing companies whose exams help determine who gets into American universities.