One mother was so thrilled with Riddell’s services, after he flew to California to help rig an exam for her daughter, that she celebrated with him and her daughter in a car on the way home, prosecutors said. The daughter ended up at Georgetown University.
Riddell, 36, appeared in Boston federal court Friday to plead guilty to charges in the college admissions scandal that has swept up celebrities, business leaders and college athletic coaches. Prosecutors said he was a key part of the scheme.
His plea followed agreements by 13 parents, including actress Felicity Huffman, to plead guilty to bribery and other forms of fraud. They are accused of paying off college officials and arranging for fake test scores to get their children into elite universities.
“At times, the students were in on it,” Eric S. Rosen, a federal prosecutor in the case, said Friday.
Riddell was impassive and nodded occasionally as the prosecutor recounted the allegations. Wearing a black scarf, slim-fitting navy suit and tortoiseshell glasses, he said little and answered, “I do, your honor,” when the judge, Nathaniel M. Gorton, asked if he understood the charges.
As part of his plea deal, the government will recommend the low end of a sentencing range between 33 to 41 months in prison on July 18. Riddell was released on $50,000 bond.
In the wake of the federal investigation, the college testing industry is now scrambling to fix weaknesses 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 needed 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 were able to double their testing time by claiming they had a disability, they could also request testing sites of their choice, sometimes thousands of miles away, where Singer would arrange for cheating.
The College Board said it was now cracking down on such site arrangements. Any cases in which students request to take tests at schools other than their own “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.
But the College Board said Friday that it did not plan to change how it grants extra-time accommodations, and defended its process as “thoughtful and balanced.” Most students who receive special allowances for tests at school “automatically” get them for standardized tests as well, the company said, although it does employ its own clinicians who may review and overrule requests in a small number of cases.
The company played down 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, the case pointed to two corrupt proctors 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% 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 typically paid $10,000 per test.
The College Board’s changes to its travel allowances came as testing companies were 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 that the scandal has perhaps drawn the most scrutiny to 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.
Assessments from private psychologists were how 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 such assessments.
The number of students who take the SAT with special accommodations fluctuates, but is generally about 4 percent 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 percent of test takers were granted extended time.
Colby said the company was reviewing its 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.