Association Tightens Identity Verification for Medical-School Entrance Exam

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

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Starting next month, medical-school applicants will have a new anatomy issue to worry about: their index fingers.

The Association of American Medical Colleges began upgrading its identity-verification procedures last year to start requiring electronic fingerprinting of all students who take the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT. Test takers' digital fingerprints, recorded by a sensor before the examination, are kept in an electronic database. In June, 10 medical schools will begin using this database to automatically verify that the applicants they are interviewing and enrolling are the same people who took the admission test.

"In a world where identity theft is becoming more and more common, and a bigger and bigger issue, I think we may be seeing more fraudulent use of identity in admissions," said Warren H. Wallace, associate dean for admissions at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, which is one of the schools testing the program. Dr. Wallace said the school had seen isolated incidents of fraud in the interviewing process.

Medical schools have worried about fraud for years. For the last few decades, MCAT takers have had to provide ink fingerprints at test sites for a paper record. The fingerprints were kept in case of later suspicions of fraud, at which point a fingerprint expert would be needed to compare the prints of the test taker and the enrolled student. Under the new electronic system, medical schools are expected to check the identities of all students they interview and enroll.

"The old process was not very effective. We supplied the paper fingerprints to schools, but we don't know if schools actually used them," said Paul Jolly, a senior associate vice president at the medical-colleges' association. "Now this technology can be used more routinely."

Digital-fingerprint information will be kept in the association's databases indefinitely, Mr. Jolly said.

"Potentially it may be useful for some time in the future for students to verify their identities," Mr. Jolly said. Hospitals, for example, may want to use the database to verify the identities of their employees, he said.

Privacy advocates say that the new MCAT fingerprinting process may threaten the privacy of students who don't realize they're consenting to having their fingerprints retained forever.

"The temptation is going to be there for additional individuals or institutions or government agencies to access that data for different and unintended purposes," said Sophia Cope, a staff lawyer at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Even though the fingerprints are being collected to prevent fraud on a test, she said, five years from now, that information could end up being transferred to a law-enforcement agency under a USA Patriot Act request.

"They're not specifically articulating to students how and when their prints might be used in the future," Ms. Cope said. "From a privacy perspective, that's unacceptable."

Some countries share this view of fingerprints as private or sensitive information. For that reason, digital fingerprints will not be taken at MCAT sites in Spain, Germany, Italy, or France.

Other postgraduate testing services require similar biometric identification procedures, though the organizations generally destroy the information at some point. For the Law School Admission Test, applicants provide an ink-on-paper fingerprint, according to a Law School Admission Council spokeswoman, Wendy Margolis, and the print is kept on record for five years.

For the Graduate Management Admission Test, used by business schools, test takers are electronically fingerprinted at the door of the test center, then fingerprinted again every time they enter the test room within the site, so that if a student leaves the room for any reason, another person cannot take his or her place. The fingerprints are destroyed after the test ends, said Bob Ludwig, a spokesman for the Graduate Management Admission Council.

Mr. Jolly, of the medical-colleges' association, dismissed the privacy concerns. "Fingerprints are not secret," he said. "You leave them everywhere."

He added that Social Security numbers are a "greater privacy concern" and that collecting fingerprints could provide students with a more convenient means of identifying themselves.