Take the entrance exam in the Eastern Time Zone, copy the answers, call a buddy in the Pacific Time Zone, tell him the answers, he sells the answers to test takers, and both of you make megabucks. This is called time-zone cheating.

American Test Center was recently caught selling answers to the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) for $6,000 to students, said Seppy Basili, director of pre-college programs for Kaplan Educational Centers, New York.

Although the man running the GRE scam was arrested and the scores of those caught cheating will be invalidated “that doesn’t mean someone else won’t try to be entrepreneurial and try it again,” Basili said.

A similar time-zone cheating ring operated from 1988 to 1991 in California selling answers for the SAT test before it was uncovered, Basili said.

Although the Educational Testing Service (ETS) that creates these tests is aware of the problem of time-zone cheating due to past occurrences, Basili said he feels the company has failed to take preventative measures against time zone cheating.

“What’s so shocking about it is that time-zone cheating is a really easy thing to fix,” Basili said.

He suggested three possible ways to prevent time zone cheating.

One obvious way to prevent people from being able to telephone across time zones with answers during test intermissions is to stagger testing times across the time zones so students everywhere really are taking the test at the same time.

However, Basili admitted this may provide an unfair advantage to students taking the test who perform better in the morning or the afternoon.

A second means of prevention, Basili said, would be to print more copies of tests, jumbling answer choices.

Another possibility is creating more tests so that each time zone is taking a completely different test.

The problem with these solutions, however, is that creating a greater variety of tests costs more, Iowa State Registrar Kathy Jones said.

Jones administers tests, including the SAT, ACT and MCAT, to students, and said she does not see time-zone cheating as plausible in the Midwest.

“Here in Ames and in the Midwest, I don’t see a potential for a problem,” she said. “I’m not sure how they actually get [time-zone cheating] to work,” she said, because when students in New York are taking their tests, students here in Iowa are already reporting for theirs.

However, with more distant time zones, cheating by these means does occur.

Mary Sunwood, professor of curriculum and instruction, had another idea for solving time-zone cheating.

“Give something that’s meaningful … rather than having little bubble sheets,” she suggested, perhaps something like essay tests.

Sunwood said she understands why students would be willing to pay as much as $6,000 on test answers.

“Getting into college is so vital, and they’re going to get into it any way they can,” she said.