15 years ago, an SAT cheating scandal on Long Island changed test taking nationwide

Samuel Eshaghoff remembers being shocked when, 15 years ago, the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office called his family’s Great Neck home and told his mother he was suspected of being the ringleader of an SAT cheating operation.

"Couldn’t believe it. There was no precedent to suggest that anything I’d been doing was against any laws," Eshaghoff, now 34, told Newsday, days before the anniversary of a scandal that led to the arrests of himself and teenagers who had paid him between $1,500 and $2,500 each to impersonate them on test day for scores as high as the 98th percentile. 

On Sept. 27, 2011, Eshaghoff became the face of the scandal, which grew to involve 20 youths — five who took tests for 15 clients from five Long Island schools. The case spurred tighter test-security protocols nationwide, provoked soul-searching over whether the stakes of testing had become too high, and foreshadowed the 2019 Varsity Blues bribery scandal, in which the rich paid millions to get their kids into elite colleges.

At the time of the scandal, the highest score was 2400. After Eshaghoff was arrested, authorities said the scores for his clients ranged from 2140 to 2220.

Eshaghoff now leads West Egg Development, a real estate firm he named after the fictional Long Island peninsula believed to be Great Neck in the iconic novel "The Great Gatsby," which he read at Great Neck North High School. The firm's projects, mostly in New York City, include apartments, restaurants, stores and a hotel. 

Challenging trust in tests

The Long Island testing scandal and others have challenged trust in standardized tests as a fair, equitable arbitrator for college admission, which can be a driver of careers, salaries and lifestyle choices, researchers said. Today, most schools don't require the ACT, another admissions test, or the SAT for applications.

More than 85% of degree-granting institutions — including all colleges on Long Island — do not require students to submit tests to gain entry, a trend that gained steam amid the shutdown during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, according to FairTest, a Brooklyn-based organization that is critical of the ACT and SAT.

Several Ivy League schools and others have since returned to requiring the exams — finding that the test is a good predictor of first-year academic success and marks — but overall, few schools have returned to the standardized test requirements for admission.

Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, said the exams are "not really an indicator of the full range of talents and habits that a young person has that can make them a good candidate for college education."

"It is a snapshot as opposed to a film," Feder said.

Future earnings

Standardized test results can still be a key factor in academic and even financial success, experts said. Each year, millions of students shuffle into exam rooms to take the now-digital SAT, about 100 questions over roughly 135 minutes.

Students who went to the most selective colleges in the early 2000s had a median salary in 2011 of $65,366, which was "26% higher than the earnings of students in the second most competitive category and 75% higher than those in the lowest (less competitive) category," according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

But researchers have debated using the test as a required gauge to unlock those potential opportunities.

Harvard University researchers found that students at Ivy Plus colleges (Ivy League schools, the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Duke University) with the highest standardized test scores had a 0.43-point advantage in first-year GPA on a 4.0 scale, while those with lower scores were five times as likely to have received at least one grade of C+ or below.

Other studies have said that having standardized testing be optional, before the pandemic, led to more admissions for lower-income students and students from underrepresented backgrounds.

ETS, which lost its contract to administer the SAT in 2025 and now owns the ACT, declined to comment for this article, according to spokeswoman Christine Betaneli. The College Board, the consortium behind the SAT, did not comment in response to messages sent electronically and left in person at its Manhattan headquarters.

Family expectations

Jutting out into the Long Island shore, Great Neck has high household incomes, educational attainment and luxury real estate.

Bernard Kaplan, principal of Great Neck North High School at the time of the scandal, described the community as an "aspirational" place where families "want the best for their kids."

But the pursuit of lofty goals often leads to pressure to meet family expectations and get into a great college, experts said.

Cheating, said Feder of Fair Test, is part of the natural flow of putting so much emphasis on the exams. He cited Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

In certain neighborhoods, Feder said, students face immense pressure to do well on standardized tests. Often, he said, the results factor into things like Zillow school ratings and other evaluations tied to how desirable a house is in a specific community.

"The idea that kids were cheating on it should not surprise people," Feder said in a phone interview. "You make something that important, and people will do everything in their power to get into Yale."

A scheme that unraveled

For Eshaghoff, the idea of taking the test for others started with a best friend he wanted to help get into a better university, he said.

"I’d heard a local legend about someone else taking a test for someone else at some point, so the seed of the idea was out there in the ether," Eshaghoff said. "I just thought through the logistics, and there were no insurmountable roadblocks, so I just went and did it."

And for over a year, beginning around November 2009, the scheme apparently went undetected. Eshaghoff said he collected cash and spent it on items like a gym membership, textbooks, a laptop and gasoline. He’d use fake IDs made at local print shops, authorities said. At least once, he flew home from Emory University in Atlanta, where he was a student, to take the test twice in a single weekend.

In the scheme, the impostor would sit for the test outside of the client's school district, to minimize the chance that the proctor would catch on.

But then the scheme started to unravel. In February 2011, faculty at Great Neck North, Eshaghoff’s alma mater, began hearing rumors about an impostor being paid to take the SAT for other students. The faculty identified suspects first by making a list of students who had taken the exam outside the district. Then they narrowed the list to six students whose grade-point averages (Bs and B-minuses) didn’t match their apparent SAT performances (around the 97th percentile). The test maker, ETS, then did a handwriting analysis and concluded that one person had taken all the tests.

Kaplan, who has since retired as principal, brought in the police and the district attorney's office, who found that the scandal had spread to other schools. Newsday archives show those schools included Roslyn High School, North Shore Hebrew Academy High School in Great Neck and St. Mary's High School in Manhasset.

All of those schools either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment, except for Great Neck Superintendent Dr. Ken Bossert. He said: "Over the last several years, our schools have focused on cultivating a culture that emphasizes learning, growth, curiosity, and individual achievement rather than defining success solely by grades, test scores, college acceptances, or comparisons with others."

Bossert added: "By reducing unnecessary stress and competition and emphasizing integrity, balance, and a genuine love of learning, we help students understand that there is no need to take shortcuts when the goal is to become the very best version of themselves. "

Kaplan said he had no regrets about involving authorities and that most students went on to do well in life. Some of the students took part in the ring because they were overwhelmed, he said; others did it to game the system.

"In the end, all the kids came out of it fine. I mean, you know, they lost some of their colleges, and they went to other colleges. ... Hopefully they learned something, and some of them didn't," he said in a phone interview.

Eshaghoff declined to say how many people he took the test for but told Newsday by text: " ‘Some people have speculated’ 30+."

The criminal case was resolved, and Eshaghoff said he received no jail time. He referred further comment about the terms of the case outcome to his lawyer at the time, Matin Emouna, who didn't return a call for comment.

An optional choice

After the 2011 scandal, a former FBI director, Louis Freeh, was hired to boost test security. Still, holes remain, according to a 2019 Politico investigation.

The scandal hastened the shift toward fully digital exams. New nationwide rules took effect, requiring students to be cross-checked at the testing center.

Michele Brower, who tutors about 25 teens in preparation for the SAT, ACT and other standardized tests, has noticed a change. Lately, the high school juniors she tutors at Long Island Tutoring and Enrichment in Melville seem to be under more stress because colleges have adopted test-optional admissions.

For one thing, exam-optional admissions have meant that the number of students who are applying for college has risen, making schools that once were considered "safe" now "likely" schools, she said. Students are weighing whether taking the exams will help them gain admission to selective schools, or whether a combination of their grades, essays and rigorous course loads will get them admitted into their school of choice.

"It's going to be a little bit more challenging for you to stand out with no score," Brower tells students. "Now they're going to look at your application so much more closely, your grades, how rigorous your curriculum is."

Brower acknowledged, though, that taking the test might not be the right fit for every child, especially for students who are anxious test takers but would otherwise do well in college.

But overall, she believes the exams are here to stay.

"They've been around for decades, and if you're going to continue to see more and more kids go to college, and college being such an important part of a steppingstone to a career, then I think that these standardized tests are going to continue to rise along with them," she said.

As for Eshaghoff, he believes tests are not worthless, serving as an indicator of how much a person has academically prepared throughout their life, even as he said, "'It's not really a hot take to say that they don't perfectly predict college worthiness. They are imperfect."

In the aftermath of the scandal, he left Emory — "I withdrew :)," he texted with an emoji — then finished his undergraduate education at Baruch College and earned an MBA from New York University.

Few people ask him anymore about the scandal, and while he's moved on with his life, he's reflective about the impact.

"It gave me no choice but to confront myself about the kind of person I wanted to be. I realized that if I wanted to make something of myself, it would have to be with honor and integrity."