The South Korean police are investigating an alleged SAT-cheating scheme in which a lecturer was said to have e-mailed a copy of the college-entrance examination, with an answer key, to two students in Connecticut whom he had tutored to prepare for the test, according to the Associated Press. The lecturer allegedly got the copy from a Thai student in Bangkok last year, then quickly e-mailed the test to the two students, who were scheduled to sit for the exam within hours. The students, who may have passed the cheat sheet on to 20 other South Korean students in the United States, ended up receiving nearly perfect scores.
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As a membrane biophysics PhD who scored 70 on my last IQ test and would undoubtedly fail an SAT I think that anything that discredits these silly multiple choice exams is a good thing. They test little more than your ability to do multiple choice test banks. So what if a few students got hold of the answer sheet. Such card-counter types will quickly fail in any highly demanding course that requires real intelligence. If you must have a multiple-choice exam set up the SAT on-line with a scrambling facility so that each student gets the questions in randomised order and the choices a-b-c-d-e also scrambled. This will defeat the card-counters. We do it routinely for our on-line tests where I work.