ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, October 31, 1996 TAG: 9610310039
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: EL MONTE, CALIF.
SOURCE: HECTOR TOBAR and RICHARD WINTON LOS ANGELES TIMES
ANSWERS FROM New York were sent to Los Angeles and inscribed on pencils.
It was a test-cramming service unlike any other.
Forget the reams of study materials and the diagrams explaining the Pythagorean theorem. The American Test Center in El Monte, 10 miles east of Los Angeles, promised a stellar score without any study whatsoever. It delivered you to your exam in a Mercedes-Benz. And, once you got there, it provided you with magical little pencils that had all the right answers.
This, according to federal prosecutors, was the service provided by George Kobayashi, an Arcadia, Calif., man now under arrest in connection with the operation of a cross-country test cheating ring.
For a price ranging up to $6,000 - or about 10 times the fee charged by legitimate test-study services - Kobayashi ushered more than 100 students through the Graduate Record Examination and other standardized tests used for college admission, according to court documents and interviews.
Officials at the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exams, said Tuesday the alleged scam was not unprecedented. The Princeton, N.J., company has been victimized by about 40 cases involving unscrupulous test-study outfits during the last two decades.
Stanford von Mayrhauser, general counsel at ETS, said his company has had trouble persuading local law enforcement officials to take action in what is often seen as a ``victimless'' crime.
``Historically, we've had difficulty in getting their attention,'' von Mayrhauser said. ``There are real victims here,'' he said, referring to colleges that are deceived and students who play by the rules.
Federal authorities began investigating Kobayashi in 1995, when a confidential informant contacted the U.S. Postal Investigation Service.
The informant had responded to an ad for the American Test Center, promising a ``unique'' five-hour crash course for a business school admission exam. By contrast, most study courses typically involve about 40 hours of classroom instruction.
After meeting with Kobayashi in a Manhattan hotel, the informant learned that the ``course'' wasn't really a course at all, according to a complaint filed in federal court in New York. Instead, the American Test Center flew the informant to Los Angeles, put her up in a hotel, and gave her a pencil with the answers.
The scam took advantage of what critics call a key flaw in ETS testing procedures: ETS gives exactly the same test, with exactly the same answers, nationwide on the same day. Kobayashi was thus able to dispatch teams of ``crack'' test-takers to the exams in New York, who then relayed the answers to Los Angeles, where the same test would be administered three hours later, officials said.
Kobayashi's employees inscribed the exam answers onto pencils and gave the pencils to paying Southern California customers, who Kobayashi shuttled to exam sites across the region, the complaint said.
Federal officials would not comment on precisely how the answers were encoded on the pencils. But sources familiar with the tests said it wouldn't be too difficult.
There are typically about 150 questions on a standardized academic test, the source said, divided in six or seven sections. There also happen to be six flat sides on a typical pencil.
``There are ways you can create patterns on the pencil in order to represent responses,'' the source said. ``We anticipate it would be easy to do. Remember, students take more than one pencil in [to the exam]. The pencil could just lie right in front of them.''
Kobayashi, 45, was being held in federal custody in Los Angeles without bail until a hearing today at which the U.S. attorney's office will request his transfer to New York, officials said.
Bob Ramsey, a Los Angeles lawyer representing Kobayashi, declined comment.
ETS was victimized by a similar ``time-zone'' cheating scam in 1991 involving the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In that case, too, East Coast test-takers provided the answers to West Coast customers. ETS pursued that case in civil court and ``shut down'' the operation, officials said.
LENGTH: Medium: 78 linesby CNB