Riddell, 36, was a key player in the college admissions cheating scandal that has swept up celebrities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, as well as business leaders and college athletic coaches. He was expected to plead guilty Friday to charges related to the case.
In the wake of a federal investigation, standardized testing officials are scrambling to fix weaknesses in the testing process that the scheme has exposed, focusing on the special-needs arrangements that allowed Riddell to do his work.
“The scheme took advantage of our efforts to accommodate students with disabilities,” said Peter Schwartz, chief risk officer and general counsel for the College Board, which administers the SAT. “We’ve never seen somebody try to weaponize that or turn that to their advantage to beat our security systems. So that’s new, and we’re addressing that specifically.”
Officials at the College Board said students who need double the time or more to take the test would now be required to take it at their home schools, with rare exceptions.
According to court papers in the admissions case, the mastermind of the cheating scandal, William Singer, knew that if students could secure double their testing time, they could also request testing sites of their choice, sometimes thousands of miles away, where Singer would arrange for Riddell to cheat on their behalf.
The College Board said it was now cracking down on such site arrangements.
“Going forward, in the very rare cases in which students request to receive school-based accommodations at a school other than their own, the College Board will require verifiable justification and implement additional enhanced security processes,” Jerome White, a spokesman for the testing company, said.
Guidelines for those exceptions were still being developed, White said.
The College Board downplayed the significance of the admissions scandal for the testing industry. Officials said it had involved a tiny number of cheating allegations over eight years, compared with the millions of SAT tests taken over the same time. Similarly, they said, it involved two corrupt proctors, according to court documents, out of tens of thousands around the world.
“Let’s be honest, this is not a kid looking over their shoulder at another kid’s answer sheet,” Schwartz said. “You’ve got to get a grown-up to jeopardize their job, their future and their freedom, because these are crimes that somebody’s going to jail for. That is really hard and really rare.”
In the admissions scheme, prosecutors say that Singer would advise wealthy clients to have their children certified as learning disabled, and ask for 100 percent extended time to take the SAT or the ACT.
Singer would then arrange sessions at one of two testing centers, a public high school in Houston, or a private college preparatory school in West Hollywood, California, where prosecutors say he bribed test administrators and enlisted Riddell’s services. He told parents to make up a reason their child had to travel so far, perhaps a wedding or a bar mitzvah.
With the collusion of test administrators, Riddell could secretly take the test or correct answers on the test. Prosecutors say he was paid $10,000 per test.
In court papers, prosecutors describe how in 2018, Singer planned to have a student travel to the Houston center to take the ACT, where Riddell would then correct his answers. The student became sick and could not go to Houston, so Riddell flew there from Tampa, Florida, the next day. Riddell took the test in his hotel room. He predicted that he would score 35 out of 36, and he did.
The College Board’s changes to its travel allowances came as testing companies have been strengthening security measures, even before the scandal broke. The College Board bans cellphones during testing and has increased random audits of test centers. In some places, tests are delivered in locked boxes that cannot be opened until test time.
The company has also been experimenting with scrambling the order of questions and answer sheets, so that a student cannot rely on copying the answers on a neighboring sheet. Students may also be given different parts of the test at different times.
But the aspects of testing to which the scandal has perhaps drawn the most scrutiny are special accommodations. Testing companies must follow federal guidelines under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Department of Justice, under President Barack Obama, issued guidance to testing companies in 2015 encouraging them to defer to documentation from qualified professionals attesting to a student’s learning disability, even if the student had not been granted formal testing accommodations by his or her school.
It is through assessments from private psychologists that many of the students in the admissions case were able to secure their special testing conditions. Some admissions experts and high school guidance counselors said they had noticed more students, typically from highly educated families, using paperwork from private psychologists to secure these allowances.
The number of students who take the SAT with special accommodations fluctuates but is generally about 4% of the total pool, according to the College Board.
Ed Colby, a spokesman for ACT, the company that administers the test of the same name, said that in recent years about 5% of test takers were granted extended time. Extra time is just one of the available accommodations, which range from Braille tests to being alone in the room with a proctor.
Colby said the company was reviewing its test security procedures “in an effort to improve the security of the ACT test,” but he declined to offer specifics. The company uses more than 5,000 test centers across the country, he said, and has had to shut down some with documented abuses — an occurrence he called “very rare.”
The court papers in the admissions case describe how Riddell engineered a huge jump in the test score of at least one student, and prosecutors marveled at his ability to calibrate test scores.
But College Board officials said Riddell’s skill was not that special and in fact demonstrated a positive side of the test. They said that a large score gain alone would not prompt a review for cheating, and that the company actively encouraged such jumps through its online test-prep service.
“What he demonstrates is that you don’t have to beat this test,” Schwartz said. “You can take it, you can study for it, you can get good at it. There are many, many people — legitimate, honest people — who work hard to prepare for it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.