The Washington Post
January 1, 1995, Sunday, Final Edition
Computerized graduate test to resume
Jim McGee, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Education Testing Service said yesterday it will resume administering the computerized version of its Graduate Record Examination (GRE) Jan. 3.
The Princeton-based ETS also sued Stanley H. Kaplan Education Centers Ltd., which prepares students to take the test, for the way it conducted an investigation that showed the exam could be compromised.
ETS suspended the computerized version of the test Dec. 15 after Kaplan officials confronted them with a nearly complete set of questions to the GRE-Computer Adaptive Test of general knowledge. The questions were assembled from the work of about 20 Kaplan employees who posed as students, took the computerized test and memorized the questions.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland Friday, accuses Kaplan of violating the federal electronic communications privacy act and copyright laws, plus breach of contract and fraud. To take the test, the Kaplan employees had to agree to abide by confidentiality provisions and acknowledge copyright warnings that appear on the computer screen, ETS said.
Kaplan, which is owned by The Washington Post Co., long has prepared students to take pencil-and-paper GRE tests, given five times a year for students seeking advanced degrees. The new computerized format, administered by Sylvan Learning Centers, allows students to take the test any time and provides a type of adaptive questioning that, based on a student's performance, can skip some of the earlier, easier questions to harder ones drawn from a central database.
The ETS lawsuit claims Kaplan set out to undermine public confidence in the computerized test because it was hurting Kaplan's primary business. "Kaplan will be required to make significant capital investment in computer technology to maintain even the perceived usefulness of its product," the suit charged.
Kaplan's chief executive officer, Jonathan Grayner, said in an interview the firm has long been concerned about security of computerized testing and had raised the issue with ETS to no avail. "We had been hearing anecdotally from our students that questions were being passed on to subsequent test takers," he said, and the firm decided to conduct its inquiry by sending product development employees to take the test.
"They were able to generate a list of questions that were appearing with frightening high rates of regularity," Grayner said. "After we had done three, we realized that the question database wasn't that big. In the medium-to-hard category the questions were showing up more than you might think."
On Dec. 9 Grayner phoned ETS President Nancy S. Cole, told her of the results of the investigation and provided ETS with a reconstructed copy of the test. ETS general counsel Stanford von Mayrhauser said in an interview the document was an inch-and-a-half thick and there were "substantial similarities" to the actual questions. "They were highly organized and focused. They focused their agents on the medium and difficult questions," von Mayrhauser said.
In the lawsuit, ETS claims "Kaplan repeatedly and insistently urged ETS to announce to the public that the integrity" of the computer administered GRE "had been compromised and to cease computer-based testing" and that "Kaplan clearly implied that if ETS did not announce the test had been compromised, Kaplan would do so."
Grayner and Kevin T. Baine, an attorney representing Kaplan, said they were surprised by the lawsuit because in an earlier news release and during private meetings, ETS officials had expressed appreciation to Kaplan for identifying a security problem.
Baine said copyright law allows for "fair use" of information and the "only use Kaplan made was to show the questions to ETS and demonstrate that its test was in need of repair."
Grayner said, "When somebody comes to you and says 'There's a problem with your test,' wouldn't you just want to fix it?"
But ETS officials maintain they have sufficient security measures in place and that Kaplan is bent on discrediting computerized testing.
Copyright 1995 The Washington Post
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