Every Chinese student who would come to the United States for higher education faces a crucial and decisive language test: the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL.
But what if instead of studying hard to pass it, one could simply buy one’s way through?
An abundance of evidence suggests that thousands of Chinese students are doing just that, taking advantage of a thriving underground industry in China—mediated through the Internet—that operates largely with impunity.
Methods for beating the test abound: from study guides available online compiled from previous years’ examinations, to finding doubles in China to sit the test in person, to, in the most organized and entrepreneurial instance, taking advantage of the time zone difference between China and the United States and feeding answers to co-conspirators across the Pacific.
Scoring ‘Even Higher’
That’s the approach that Zhang Li (not his real name) took when he wanted a better score with less hassle for entrance to New York University.
He’s now a 28-year-old graduate student at NYU, and he admits to cheating his way through the TOEFL test.
Zhang Li simply went online and purchased the “Jijing Live Service” (Jijing translates roughly to “computer test bible”). Because the same TOEFL test is administered in both the United States and China, the Jijing services, based in China, take advantage of the time difference to feed the questions back to their clients.
“I would have scored high enough to get into NYU even without cheating, but I wanted to score even higher with less effort by cheating,” Zhang Li said. “The higher your test scores are, the better chance you have to get scholarships.”
Once he had the answers in hand, he peddled them to other students, getting back his investment plus a bit of walking around money.
As Easy as ABC
The ease with which cheating can be perpetrated indicates that there are probably many more Zhang Li’s taking advantage of the loophole.
A search on Taobao, the Chinese version of eBay, offers hundreds of sellers hawking their test-beating wares.
One seller provides a detailed introduction of his “Jijing Live” service, along with a schedule of upcoming tests, notes on when answers will be available, and instructions for purchasing the service.
Just like Ebay sellers who deal in legitimate products, the Jijing service’s Taobao webpage features reviews and remarks of previous clients, along with accuracy ratings.
An Epoch Times reporter followed the instructions on the page, paid up to become a “member,” and registered for answers for the Feb. 11, 2011, TOEFL test.
The examination took place both in China and the United States (the former 13 hours earlier). Just as advertised on the Taobao page, the seller emailed step-by-step notifications, and different parts of the exam streamed in throughout the morning.
Hours before the examination was going to be taken in the United States, an Epoch Times reporter had received all of the questions, and answer tips to boot.
Product Review
As though they had just bought a juice blender or had their computer repaired, Chinese students leave product reviews and experience reports on the web pages of the companies that offer the cheating services.
“I would like to share my experience of finding a test replacement,” one young man wrote. A “test replacement” refers to a lookalike who can do the test in the stead of the real applicant. He wrote that his English has always been poor but he wanted to go abroad to study.
“I had a friend who got a good mark with the ‘TOFEL IELTS Test Replacement Association,’ so I went with them too,” he wrote.
“Their service is really remarkable. They have a very detailed plan for test replacement, with every single step considered properly. I feel I can really count on such a service. Thanks a lot to the help of ‘TOFEL IELTS Test Replacement Association’ for my poor English.”
Crowdsourced Cheating
Behind the simple transaction of paying the fee and getting the questions has sprung up a veritable industry in China.
The testing organization, ETS, recycles questions from year to year. The ability to carefully study those questions is helpful both when encountering them again and for revealing the test patterns.
The “Jijing” method gets brought to a new level when the data collection is crowdsourced: volunteers who take the test rush back home and type down what they remember to share it with others about to take it; some of the companies offering Jijing services hire people to take the tests and memorize the questions.
They stitch all that together, figure out the answers together, and sell it in their online store. Students can download that work and use it for their test the following (or same) day.
Searching for the term in Google or Baidu, a major search engine in China, reveals pages upon pages advertising such services, with variations like sets of past test questions and the best answers. The scale is vast; prices go from fifty yuan (US$8) to hundreds of yuan.
The Motive
Over the past decade there has been an explosion in the number of Chinese students studying in the United States. A quarter of all foreign students here come from mainland China: nearly 200,000 of them in the 2011-2012 academic year.
For these individuals, years of study in America can be the gateway to a new life. But the linchpin of the enterprise is a good command of English.
Chinese parents are willing to give up everything they have to see their children to succeed—and there are few greater markers of success than a degree from a prestigious university in the United States.
The TOEFL test, and the broader test of intellectual aptitude, the GRE, are crucial to get into these institutions.
Scholarships are also dispensed with metrics like English aptitude in mind, so students that come from merely middle class families have an incentive to boost their chances.
In 2001 ETS filed a lawsuit against China’s New Oriental School, which used real ETS test questions and cracked the patterns in them to train Chinese students to get unusually high scores; there have also been cases individuals caught cheating in Hong Kong, where Chinese students hired lookalikes with superb English to take the tests for them.
With a rapidly increasing number of Chinese students competing for limited university places and scholarships, the pressures to cheat have only increased. It doesn’t help that there’s only minor punishment for getting caught.
Colleges Keep Arm’s Length
Universities usually outsource the work associated with administering the tests, though policies among them differ. Colleges that were asked to comment did not indicate how familiar they were with the extent and ease of cheating on language exams.
“We’re not aware of any recent reported instances involving Columbia students, and we have no further comment,” wrote Robert Hornsby, Assistant Vice President of media relations at Columbia University, in an email response.
NYU’s James Devitt gave a more substantive reply, saying that the university “takes the sanctity of its application process extremely seriously.” He added: “We are aware that some applicants do try to buy test answers.” Devitt said that because of such practices, NYU has its own procedure for testing English proficiency.
Those who don’t measure up go to remedial English classes (which, full of foreign students, have also become a lucrative source of income for colleges.)
The Epoch Times contacted ETS, the company that administers the tests, and explained the wide availability of methods by which their tests are gamed. Thomas Ewing, the director of communications, said that no testing firm is free from cheating and that ETS does its best to prevent cheats.
“When a company tests on a global basis there is practically no way to create or administer enough forms of the test to cover the entire world with multiple tests each month, twelve months a year in 180 countries,” Ewing wrote in an email response. He added that “the vast majority of students who take our tests do so honestly,” that those who cheat are discovered, and that “ETS takes test security very seriously.”
Few Consequences
Despite the apparent preventative measures, incentives for cheating abound—it’s cheap, fast, and convenient—and purveyors of the test kits do their best to minimize the fallout if students are caught.
Mr. Wang, a staffer at one of the service companies, said cheerily in an interview with an enquiring student client that “The worst result is that you can’t test this year.” He claimed that if a student was caught, his company would be able to “fix” the teacher in China through their “social network,” so the student wouldn’t be expelled from school. He added: “If anything happens, we will return all your money.”
With reporting by Matthew Robertson.
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