PSU students arrested in cheating scandal
Police arrested seven foreign students enrolled in Oregon universities including two from Portland State, on suspicion of wire fraud, allegedly having hired impostors to take an English equivalency test for them. Six were arrested in Portland, one in Eugene.
Those arrested in Portland include Ahmed S. Alsuwaidi, 24; Tareq Al-Shebli, 23; Ahmed Al Qimzi, 27; Mansour Hosain Al-Hajeri, 22; Fahed M. Al Harmodi, 23 and Hassan K. Almahdi, 39. Suhail Al Ameri, 22, was arrested in Eugene.
Alsuwaidi and Qimzi are PSU students, Al-Hajeri and Al Harmodi attend Lewis and Clark along with Shebli recently graduated.
Preliminary hearings scheduled for Wednesday were postponed to Friday. Today the court will hear from the New Jersey grand jury as to whether any of those charged have been indicted in the case. The men arrested had their visas confiscated and were told not to leave Oregon without permission.
Nationwide, 56 arrests were made in connection to the ring, in 13 states and Washinton D.C., including four in Washington state.
The investigation of alleged fraud in taking the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) began in New Jersey, home to Educational Testing Sevices (ETS) which developed the test.
Neither the investigations nor the arrests involved PSU’s Office of Public Safety, according to Director John Fowler.
Local news services, including KGW, picked up the story. The Oregonian brandished a statement from Michael Chertoff, assistant U.S. attorney general for the Department of Justice that “This type of document fraud is a threat to our national security.” Chertoff was referring to the possibility that the students charged were cheating on the TOEFL exam to evade student visa requirements.
No charges of terrorist activities have been assigned to those arrested, according to Charles Gorder, an assistant U.S. attorney in Portland. According to Gorder the investigation began before the Sept. 11 attacks took place.
The TOEFL exam is a standardized test that has been in place for nearly 40 years. Each year ETS estimates that 800,000 people take the test. The TOEFL can be taken either in paper-based or electronic form, according to Christina Luther, assistant director of International Education Services. PSU administers the paper-based test.
When students sign up to take the test they must present passport identification, and when they arrive to take the test they must show a photo ID. “We require a passport when they take the test,” Luther said, “so we aren’t using any Oregon ID at all.”
PSU requires the test for students who wish to enroll in non-ESL English classes.
The students in question allegedly hired test takers to complete their exams for them. Two main test takers have been identified as Mahmoud Firas, 36, of Riverside, Calif., and Begad Abdel-Megeed, 21, of Alexandria, Va.
This isn’t the first time ETS has had a problem with a cheating ring in connection to one of its tests. In 1996 the FBI busted an elaborate scheme in California that involved crossing time zones and encoded pencils in order to cheat on the ETS’s Graduate Record Exam (GRE).
In 2000, a number of teachers, mostly in the Southwest, were indicted on charges of fraud for cheating on ETS’s PRAXIS series of tests, which many states require for initial teaching certificates.
ETS recently sued Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center for copyright infringement in connection to a study that the Kaplan center did investigating how easy it was to obtain the questions to ETS’s GRE.
The ETS issued a press release in response to the arrests which stated the company “initially uncovered the scheme, notified authorities and then cooperated with federal law enforcement officials during the investigation.”
In response to the attacks of Sept. 11, the Bush administration has stepped up its efforts to apprehend those who would circumvent the usual methods of immigration into the United States.
Rumors that Hani Hanjour, one of the hijackers involved in the September attacks, had obtained entrance to the United States with a student visa raised interest in the security of the visa process. It was later shown that Hanjour did not enter the country on a student visa.
Less than 2 percent of non-immigrant visas are student visas, according to State Department records. A student visa requires more of the applicant than a tourist or business visa does. An applicant must prove that he or she is enrolled in a university and has ties in his or her country of origin. In order to be accepted to many universities, students must prove their proficiency with the English language, often by taking the TOEFL.
