Last week, one of the 61 students arrested last year on charges of fraudulent test-taking on the Test of English as a Foreign Language was convicted and may soon be deported, said Sarah Gurka, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office. Fourteen others have pleaded guilty and are pending conviction, she said.
In May 2002, the 61 students were arrested in 13 states and the District of Columbia after the Princeton-based Educational Testing Service discovered the fraud.
The cases were turned over to New Jersey's U.S. Attorney's office after initial court appearances in their home districts.
All the students have now been released on bond and are awaiting trials in their home districts.
Universities use the TOEFL when admitting foreign students.
The exam is also used to determine whether or not a foreign student can receive a visa to stay in the United States, making test-taking a federal issue.
Any student convicted of such an offense risks deportation, Gurka said.
"They allegedly committed fraud (although some pleaded guilty, so it is no longer simply alleged). As soon as they entered the country, they chose (again, allegedly) not to adhere to U.S. laws by falsifying documents or, in this case, test data that would permit their student visas to be renewed," Gurka said in an email.
Because many of the students were of Middle-Eastern origin, it was suspected by many Islamic organizations that the federal government was unfairly targeting the students as "terrorists."
However, the case against the students is not one of selective targeting, said Tom Ewing, a spokesman for ETS. Because the students are accused of mail fraud and immigration-related issues, the INS, the U.S. Postal Service and the FBI were brought into the cases.
"It has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that these students are from the Middle East," said Ewing.
According to the Associated Press, the cases were listed as "international terrorism" from the time they were opened. One of the prosecutors' concerns was that several of the students held flight licenses.
The U.S. Attorney's office declined to comment about the flight licenses.
The students were accused of hiring others to take the TOEFL. Six impersonators took over 130 TOEFL exams. They replaced the pictures on the exam results with a photo of the real students and sent the results to universities in fake ETS envelopes.
ETS discovered the fraud after examining the photos of the impersonators that were taken at the testing center upon registration.
"Eventually we noticed that this person, persons, kept turning up," Ewing said.
Though ETS does not usually discover such widespread fraud, another prominent case involved Po-ching Ma, who was paid thousands of dollars to supply fraudulent GRE exams to students, Ewing said.
Ma was prosecuted in federal court, but disciplinary action was left to the universities the students attended, he added.
The U.S. Attorney's office does not actively request information on possible terrorist connections of foreign students, Gurka said.
Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel said she had no information on the University's policy on fraudulent TOEFL exams.
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