Pittsburgh authorities indict 15 Chinese in college test-taking scheme

[Newsjock]

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A group of 15 Chinese nationals in the U.S. and China schemed to have impostors take college entrance exams by using fake passports for identification in the hopes of obtaining student visas for entry to U.S. universities, federal prosecutors in Pittsburgh said Thursday.

The U.S. Attorney’s office said the defendants, including two living in Pittsburgh, defrauded Educational Testing Services and the College Board, which administer standardized tests, between 2011 and 2015 by either taking the tests for others or paying others to take the tests for them.

Prosecutors said some of the conspirators had counterfeit Chinese passports made in China and sent to the U.S., where they were used by the impostors to fool administrators into thinking they were other people before taking exams conducted in Pittsburgh and its suburbs.

... The 35-count indictment, handed up May 21 and unsealed Thursday, identifies some of the defendants as students who paid up to $6,000 for others in the U.S. to pretend to be them in taking tests, such as the SAT, at Barack Obama Academy, another testing site in Monroeville and elsewhere.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2015/05/28/Pittsburgh-authorities-indict-15-Chinese-in-alleged-college-test-taking-scheme-SAT/stories/201505280178

[DetlefK]

1. Now they are counterfeiting... people?

[Historic NY]

2. Made in China.

by China for China.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Always suspected something like this ...

Pitt admitted hordes of Chinese graduate students, then departments discovered some of them made marginal TAs and had to be assigned non-teaching jobs, while other grad students had to take up the slack and their degree progress suffered for it ... somehow a certain percentage of (mainland) Chinese grads just never matched their pumped-up applications for admission, even though many of them had post-Baccalaureate degrees, unlike the other grads. The gap between mainland Chinese and ethnic Chinese from outside the Mainland (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, overseas) was also pretty hard to miss -- and not just at Pitt.