Psst! Wanna get a good score on the SAT? Forget studying - the (criminally) smart way is to buy the perfect score.
Here's the story by Alison Stewart at 60 Minutes of how one really smart guy named Sam Eshaghoff ran a criminal enterprise of taking tests for profit (an academic gun for hire, if you will), and how he got caught:
Eshaghoff: As soon as I took that first test, and I went in and I killed it, like my first time ever taking the test for somebody else, I got a perfect score on the math section. It was like, "Whoa, that was easy and that was great. And I'm good at this."
It was clockwork from there. Over the course of nearly three years, he took the SAT over and over again, consistently scoring in the 97th percentile or higher for the students he called his "clients."
Eshaghoff: I mean my track record speaks for itself. Like if you know somebody's so stellar at doing something so flawlessly, without one exception it goes without saying: that's a reliable service.
Stewart: Were you invested at all in the score you would get?
Eshaghoff: Oh yeah, absolutely. Just like any other business person, you wanna have a good track record, right? And essentially like my whole clientele were based on word of mouth and like a referral system. So as soon as I, like, as soon as I saved one kid's life...
You nailed it. If this kid is so intelligent, why does he talk like some 10-year-old skate boarder? And having some sense of morality is also a sign of intellect. I wonder if this nit-wit even considered how many honest test-takers he cheated? I don't care what this article claims, this POS is as stupid as a box of rocks.
Yes the kid's a jerk and so are the people who hired him, but the big question here is why is the system so easy to abuse? The people in charge of the tests need to take a fair share of the blame and be punished too.