From the New York Times: On an early morning in June 2017 a teenage girl got on a plane in San Jose and flew to Los Angeles, arriving at a testing center in West Hollywood to take a college-entrance exam.
Her parents, Elizabeth and Manuel Henriquez, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, had handpicked the testing site.
While most students take their entrance exams at large public high schools near their homes, the Henriquezes chose a private institution, the West Hollywood College Preparatory School.
It was one of two testing sites where Mr. Singer cultivated relationships with test administrators who would accept bribes, according to court documents. For $10,000 per test, and sometimes more, the documents say, Igor Dvorskiy ensured that students could be given answers from the proctor.
Federal prosecutors say that’s what happened when the Henriquezes’ daughter arrived.
On a visit this week, nothing at the school suggested it was the site of one of the biggest testing scandals in decades. It is tucked inside a small building of a large old synagogue. The entrance to the school is a solitary white door with a small blue sign emblazoned with its name.
The school’s website describes it as offering a “‘cradle-to-college’ education by providing a family-like nurturing academic environment with small class sizes.” Mr. Dvorskiy is listed as the director of the school.
The court documents make clear that federal investigators closely monitored the school for several months, tracking Ms. Dvorskiy on the days of the college entrance exams with Mr. Singer’s clients.
Typically, Mr. Singer would tell his clients “fabricate a reason — such as a bar mitzvah or a wedding — that their children purportedly needed to take the test in Houston or West Hollywood instead of at their own schools,” according to court documents.
“The extent of the fraud that took place at this testing center should be a major red flag to the College Board,” said Alexis Redding, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied college admissions. “There has always been tremendous variability in the quality and professionalism of testing sites and that opens the door for cheating to occur. Students tend to know which sites have inattentive proctors or lax policies.”
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