A second student in Hong Kong has been handed a three-month prison sentence for hiring a body double to take the TOEFL test (at a test center) on their behalf.
According to the South China Morning Post, the test taker scheduled a test at a center in Cambodia, but “[o]n the day of the test, the student claimed to be unwell, then hired a fraudster outside the examination hall to take the exam in her place.”
Reporting in the Standard confirms this detail, noting that “[s]he claimed she fell ill on the test day and was approached by an unknown person who offered to take the test for US$300.”
The deception was detected only when the student’s university later “questioned the veracity of the result.”
Jeepers. Some readers might still be under the impression that test-center cheating is a sophisticated and tricky thing. But perhaps it is time for a rethink, as apparently would-be proxy test takers can be found milling about outside test centers looking for clients. And they work cheap.
Regular readers know that test takers who want to cheat often travel across borders to test centers where they think their schemes will be easier to pull off. In this way, a fraudulent test result can be combined with a trip to the beach, or with the consumption of mixed drinks served at very low prices.
This sort of “exam tourism” is a phenomenon most often associated with paper-based testing, but as you can see computer-delivered testing is vulnerable as well.