College Loans Consolidation Blog

Over 6,000 MBA students have been implicated in a huge cheating scandal involving the website Scoretop which illegally provided “live” prep questions to students taking their Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT — the test that many MBA programs require for admission to graduate school, according to an article in Business Week (“GMAT Cheating Controversy Grows,” June 27, 2008).

Contrary to authorized test preparation companies like Kaplan or Manhattan GMAT which legally purchase retired test questions from GMAT to help prepare their member students, Scoretop extended 30-day VIP service to students who paid the $30-fee to access questions that were actively being used on GMAT exams.

On June 23, the Graduate Management Admission Council, the owner of the GMAT, won a lawsuit against Scoretop for copyright infringement, since Scoretop published the “live” GMAT questions online without permission. The judgment allowed the court to seize Scoretop’s hard drive, which contained payment and other data, and to identify more than 6,000 individuals who had paid for the website’s service.

GMAC originally said it would cancel the scores of all students who cheated on the exam, make sure they could never take the GMAT again, and notify the respective business schools of students who had cheated on the exam.

Robert Burgoyne, GMAC’s legal counsel recently said, however, that GMAC probably wouldn’t cancel the scores of all 6,000 Scoretop VIP members who took the test, just those who knew using the questions was illegal. “We’ll look for something that actually links people to conduct they should have known was improper,” Burgoyne said.