Another Cheating Scandal

True but now the website is no more and is involved in some judicial case.

my 2c though.

wow, rhyme! after readng some of that i dont know whether to be sad or happy.that place seems to be such a mess...its terrible i even got associated with it. i think for all of us the lesson is simple...in all these cases study the legitimat position of the site before you do anything. it is true even on this great forum, check if documents are all proper and dont allow ciruclation, otherwse there will be one more bunch of people who had no clue get to truble (ha ha against a big tide i am the one person fighting it!!)

about people who write blogs in public and claim htey used jj's, my god???!

Rhyme,

Your investigative abilities and dedication are very impressive. Like many others, I initially thought that GMAC was over-reacting since there is no possible way that people could remember questions from their tests and there is no way that testtakers would try to memorize actual questions instead of finetuning the concepts/approaches.

Section 3 on Page 8 is pretty damning. Some random google searching brought me to this:

https://comitment.wordpress.com/2008/04/ ... -of-a-780/

Money quotes:

"However, IF, one is looking at the scoring 700+, generally speaking, the commercially available preparatory materials, AND THAT INCLUDES THE OFFICIAL GUIDE, are simply not enough. Most everyone on ScoreTop already knows this, so I mention it for the benefit of any guests who might happen upon this post."

" Start doing the JJ’s (JJ = Jungle Juice = material that IS representative, and I mean EXTREMELY representative). Hit the ‘Forum’ button in the ‘Community’ drop-down menu, then choose the appropriate sub-forum."

"In the weeks before your actual exam, do the MJJ’s DAILY, as they are posted, so that you don’t get behind (and end up trying to do 150 questions in a single day’not a great idea, I’m telling you). Suffice to say, it is a VERY GOOD IDEA to know the current month’s MJJ’s cold when you sit down to take the GMAT. Oh, and did I mention to make sure that you KNOW THE CURRENT MONTH’S MJJ’s when you walk into that exam room."

It is clear that all these testtakers knew what these JJ's are. I really hope that the schools will do something about this. I am hoping to start on my MBA this fall and I sure dont want cheaters in my class!

In the interest of people's privacy, I support moving this thread to wherever it should be to be more private.

Praet?

ryhme..LOL..so i am here studying for my gmat..and i spend the whole 1 hour reading your posts..

LOL..you guys are good..nail the the steak down their cheating hearts..come on..

LMAO... now now... i will give each of my chinese friends the benefit of the doubt..however just to be safe will pose them some brutal SC questions..if they get em wrong..they are busted

The documents clearly say that SC1000, CR1000 and RC1000 are copyrighted. So GMATClub is in danger too. Almost 99% of the test takers are also in danger b/c everyone uses these docs.

two people on businessweek (comment section of the article) are claiming that they are going to sue GMAC and people have asked them if their score were cancled but they didn't answer.

HAHAHAHAHAA. I'd love to see them try.

"Dear Officer of the Court, I wasn't aware that going online and reading the questions that I was going to answer the next day constituted cheating."

Prosecution, your witness....

"You are a !@(#tard."

Link please. I wanna go start up a **** with my PDFs.

The documents also lists Lei Shin's phone number. I just gave him a call to see what he had to say about the whole thing -- you know, get the other side of the story -- and he pretty much just said it was a lie and that there was no copyrighted material and that he cant control what people post, etc etc. Sadly not an especially strong argument. He was so adamant, I kind of think he truly believed it.

Eventually he caved a bit and admitted to the JJs, only to then say they had long since been removed (which for all I know is true) and that GMAC was stifling competition by controlling the questions (well, duh, thats the !(@# business model)... Finally, he admitted to having put scoretop.com back up at another url, which I won't be listing here for a dozen reasons, not the least of which is that I don't want this guy to make any more money.

Unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to ask about how GMAC got the hard drive.

LOL..looks like inspector clueso is on the loose..

Ryhme..are you serious about calling the guy??? +1 for following up on this..I just cant help myself from cracking ...serious this is hilarious..

Totally serious. I even tape recorded it.

OK..i have to hear this one..can you post it on youtube???

Not sure I feel comfy with that, but if you are ever in chicago, ill play it for you.

Woww Rhyme!!! Many Thanks. This is a serious piece of journalism.

Now, I seriously think, many of VIP people went into the test with intention of remembering questions. I do not think it is just possible to remember the questions verbatim for a regular test taker ( I consider myself a good test taker but during the testing session, my temperature rises, I get jittery to keep up the speed even after knowing I am doing good, it was just impossible to keep anything in mind apart from the current question you are at).

Now, it is serious and very few participants in paid sections seemed to be ignorant.

all I can say is... WOW!

9 pages in one day. Great discussions, great investigations rhyme, and shocking proof.

I still can't believe you called the guy... was he your GSB classmate? He actually let you record him?

BTW, I've heard about this "memorizing test questions" thing way back. A couple friends told me that it's prevalent in China/India for people to go take the test every day and memorize a few questions at a time and publish a "book" of questions and answers. They told me that's how many (note, NOT all) Chinese/Indian test takers get insanely high verbal scores (especially CR and RC) when they can barely speak or read/write English (well, maybe not the Indians, but definitely the Chinese) when they get here. This is pretty prevalent with GREs too.

I kind of believed their stories but just shrugged it off, until this whole thing blew up and rhyme uncovered some great finds. To tell you the truth, even though I've believed this to be true for a while now, I'm still a little shocked by the whole thing and how blatant the guilty ones are. It's just crazy.

In some ways, I blame the culture in those countries where the pressure to succeed is so great that even your every day ethical person breaks down to gain an advantage. I don't think people here in the US will ever understand, but when only the top few people of each province (20 something provices) in China get into the top local schools, and then the very top few of those schools get into a US top MBA program, can any of us Americans imagine the competition involved? This is out of almost 1.5 B people. I'm not saying it's right for them to cheat like this, but I can definitely empathize with their reasoning for taking this illegal path.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that our discussions here are yet again light years above BW's. Makes me proud to be a member here.

GMAC could somehow figure out who cheated by examining the time the test takers took to solve questions. As I mentioned the edge these cheaters also had is the "time advantage" of "solving" the questions they had previously seen in 10 seconds, and having 5 minutes to solve another question they hadn't seen before.

I believe that if somebody just guesses this would happen at the end of the test, so GMAC could see what the pattern of these suspects was. Assuming 2 min per question imagine that someone “solve” 5 questions at the beginning/middle of the test, he/she would have around 9 extra minutes for 5 harder questions later. These people finishing the GMAT with 15 minutes to spare either are super smart or cheaters.

Rhyme, have you worked as a private investor already? Impressive work! Kudos!

I believe you showed to us that if GMAC really wants to bust these people, it could find means to do so.