Cheating on At Home GMAT and EA
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08 Jul 2020, 21:27
RE: " Second you need a pretty good camera and a pretty good system to take the test. It needs to be focused well enough and have the right amount of brightness and zoom and quality for the person on the other end to actually see and read the questions."
Focusing a camera to view a laptop screen can be done by almost anyone. It's more about the quality of the camera than the operator. Especially when an unlimited amount of time exists to stage the room and focus the camera, before the "proctor" appears to "check" the room.
RE: "The person also has to be very good test taker to solve the questions fast enough and get the correct answers and a smart person as that may not be willing to put the reputation on the line. They probably can make more money tutoring. To make it worthwhile you have to pay them quite a bit..."
This comes back to incentives and potential return on investment. Regarding incentives, pay an expert 10K to get you a 760 or above with no payment until that goal is hit, meaning the exam may need to be retaken. The test taker preps, runs through some moc situations with you, and gets it on his first try. Not a bad pay for a half days work doing something they are already good at.
Regarding return on investment, say you pay someone 10K and they get you a 760 on the GMAT. Now your dad can tell his buddies his son/daughter got into XYZ top 10 b-school. Besides, he doesn't care how much money it costs for your private "tutoring." Now, onto merit based scholarships which are often times handed out with one's GMAT score as the primary factor. Say you paid for this out of pocket (not dads) and get half your tuition covered from a top program costing ~80k/year, thus benefiting you ~80K over two years. That's a 7x profit on your investment. Quite a good return on investment over two years. Or say you go to a lesser ranked school but this time with a full ride, that may be even better. This isn't even factoring in if someone has done little to no studying. Even higher ROI in adding this factor in.
All that said, strong incentives exist to get as high of GMAT / EA score as possible, thus GMAC must expect individuals to try and cheat. A major job of GMAC is to guard the integrity of their exams. And they are failing at that by allowing at home versions of these exams due to the limited security measures inherent to at home testing. IE: no metal detector, no control the room preventing easily hiding a camera. It's naïve and thus negligent. Test takers who took their exams at a testing center should not be okay with at home exams as your score is now worth less than before at home testing was introduced.
RE: " There’s a camera constantly watching you and analyzing your behavior. If someone else is taking the test what are you going to do?"
Act like you are thinking and working. This is not hard. Besides, when you know the likelihood in being caught is low, what's there to be worried about? The digital proctor? Haha. Digital proctor.
Bb - it's naïve to think people are not cheating on the at home gmat and ea. Follow the incentives and potential returns on obtaining a high GMAT score. Then move to the likelihood, IE: weak/no controls in place to prevent this (example given) and other types of cheating possible in at home testing.