Imposter Taking SAT Test is Caught

The Long Island SAT cheating scandal was reviewed by the television program, 60 Minutes (see link here). The teenage perpetrator charged morally and cognitively challenged students $2500 per test and took tests for others twenty times. He concluded by saying it was easy to take the test for others and could do so easily today.

The College Board, the organization that administers and grades the SAT test requires that students bring picture identification to the test (see link). So the Long Island cheater must have counted on a perfunctory checking of identification. Since the cheater even took a test for his girlfriend, it seems in this case that the IDs weren't checked at all. I asked my own children about their experience taking the test, and they said that their IDs were checked. Perhaps the Long Island cheater wore disguises.

I phoned and sent an email to the College Board, and they replied that they are conducting an internal investigation.

Postscript, July 27, 2012: The College Board found that the Long Island cheater helped girls with gender-neutral names. This should not happen any more. Test takers nation-wide will be required to send in picture ID in advance, and the picture "will be printed on their admission tickets and the roster at the test center." The scores will also be automatically sent to the students' high schools. Failing students achieving top SAT scores will be investigated. I believe that the College Board has improved the "security of the process." Students will not get away with impersonating each other. Other types of cheating such as copying may still occur, though I believe incidents are rare. See the link to the story here.

So, Talent Matters After All

Chess Grandmaster Judit Polgar

Professors David Hambrick and Elizabeth Moss, in their op/ed piece, Sorry Strivers: Talent Matters, review the literature about skill acquisition. The idea that putting in 10,000 hours of practice is the key component of success, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers (excerpts here), and that practice matters more than intelligence once you have reached a minimum intelligence threshold has become "enthusiastically championed."

Hembrick and Moss disagree. They write: "Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point."

A longitudinal study by Lubinski and Benbow compared the accomplishments of youth that scored in the 99.9 percentile of SAT score versus those that scored "only" in the top 99.1 percentile. Those in the 99.9 percentile

"were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage."

Similarly, Hembrick and Moss have found that working memory capacity predicts better performance in music sight reading and other complex activities.

The research doesn't mean that practice is unimportant. It just must be balanced by the fact that talent matters too.

I find this research to be comforting. I no longer need to blame myself for not becoming a chess master or marimba virtuoso. I no longer need to say to myself, "Ah, if I had only practiced longer." I didn't have enough natural ability to be a star, but I put in enough hard work in these fields to be competent.