According to an article in The Standard, a Lingnan University student has pleaded guilty to cheating on the TOEFL test. The student, aged 22, is out on bail while awaiting sentencing.
Says the article: “After failing four English tests, Huang traveled to Cambodia in May 2024 to sit the TOEFL exam. The court heard that she then arranged for another person to take the test on her behalf for US$300 after becoming ill on the exam day.”
In this case, the deception was noticed only after the university received an official TOEFL score report. The university questioned the cheater and later contacted ETS, which confirmed that the deception had occurred.
]Why did ETS fail to notice this before being contacted by the score user? That is unknown.
Why did the cheater go all the way to Cambodia to commit this fraud? That is also unknown.
Is the test center in question particularly crappy? Could be.
Body double fraud has been going on for longer than I’ve been alive. Apparently, it is quite hard to stop. Indeed, the final paragraph of the article notes that some other dude is set to be sentenced today for the same crime.
As I mentioned here a few days ago, people are cheating on at-home tests and people are cheating on on-site tests. There is quite a lot of cheating. Cheating on English tests. Cheating on accreditation tests. So much cheating. I’ve been cheating on my diet non-stop since landing in Cairo 12 days ago.
Before declaring on-site tests to be a sort of gold standard, we could ask test makers what they are doing to fight this kind of fraud, beyond just looking really closely at test taker ID.