Cheating is rampant at many test centers. Among the cheating methods we have
encountered are sharing answers during the breaks between sections, peeking at
other people’s answer sheets, communicating answers through sophisticated
body language codes, leaving a dictionary in the restroom and looking up words
during the breaks, and even having one student take the test for another student.
Two kids at Larry, Manek, and Paul’s high school cheated by using the
following method. Since their last names were Basset and Bates (the names have
been changed to protect the guilty), they knew that they would be sitting near
each other during the test. Basset was a math whiz and Bates was a vocabulary
guru. So when the proctor turned around, they traded tests. Basset did Bates’s
math sections and Bates did Basset’s verbal sections. They both did very well
and—what a surprise—they both got exactly the same score.
Another way of cheating that we heard of involved using M&M’s.
Throughout the test, one kid would eat different-colored M&M’s, each one
standing for a letter—yellow for A, green for B, etc. The other kid would watch
her and know what the right answer was. The problem with this method is that
the College Board creates several tests for every date that the SAT is offered, and
proctors distribute them randomly throughout your testing center. So the person
sitting next to you is not necessarily taking the same test as you.
Should you cheat? No. You should not cheat. You see, there’s nothing wrong
with beating the system by learning what you’ve learned in this book because,
although we do teach you a lot of tricks, we don’t break any rules. But if you
beat the system by breaking the rules, you are doing something that’s wrong.
You will feel guilty and wish you hadn’t done it. When your friends who didn’t
cheat don’t get into their first-choice colleges and you do, you will feel awful.
Just ask Basset and Bates.