Authorities in Japan recently busted a 27-year-old university student for allegedly cheating on the TOEIC (story here and here). The Japanese police, acting on a tip, sent undercover agents to a local testing center and nabbed the suspected cheater. Apparently he was planning to use a microphone to communicate answers to others in the room. As he was being dragged away by the cops, 30% of the test takers in the center decided to just go home.
A few thoughts come to mind:
- Obviously, test-center administrations are not automatically better than at-home administrations (or vice versa). Both approaches have potential weaknesses.
- When a particular test center is deemed to have poor security, unscrupulous test takers will flood into that test center to take advantage of it. Some of these test takers will be domestic, and others will be from abroad. Frequent audits are necessary to ensure that test centers maintain rigorous standards. Mystery test-takers should be utilized as well.
- Test makers care a lot about security at test centers. However, not all test-centers are self-operated. Test makers depend on their partners to uphold their standards. Frequent audits are necessary to ensure that they do so.
- Paper tests create extra challenges since many people (sometimes everyone) in the room have the same test form. Computer-based delivery can eliminate this concern.
- Recent moves by the IELTS partnership to limit use of the paper-based IELTS may be due to some of the aforementioned points, but I suppose they’ll never say.