That’s how the officer had made sergeant before being commissioned. And it’s how potentially thousands of soldiers earn promotion points every year.

Now the Army says it’s finally getting serious about the problem of cheating on correspondence courses. This week, commanders will start receiving letters from Training and Doctrine Command identifying suspected cheaters and requesting assistance in the investigation. The first 20 letters went out Sept. 25.

But as TRADOC tries to clamp down on a problem that has plagued Army promotion tests since their inception, it is seeking help from some of the same people who have facilitated and even, in some cases, encouraged cheating in the past: noncommissioned officers and junior officers.

And that raises questions about how effective this latest crackdown will be.

“How can noncommissioned officers, who cheated themselves, be expected to enforce rules against cheating?” asks Cpl. Robert Eckert of the 172nd Chemical Company at Fort Riley, Kan.

Eckert, 43, who’s been in the Army three years, admits he, too, has cheated, earning about 20 points that way on correspondence courses. He shouldn’t have done it, he says, but, as with Michelle, he didn’t even consider cheating until he was coaxed to do so by his chain of command.

Michelle (not her real name) and Eckert are two of countless soldiers who have cheated — and continue to cheat — on correspondence courses to speed up promotions, all in violation of federal ethics rules spelled out by the Defense Department’s Joint Ethics Rule.

According to the Army, in March 2009 (the latest available figures) 300,000 soldiers were enrolled in the Army Learning System. The vast majority of those soldiers are taking correspondence courses.

Cheating for points has been an open secret the Army leadership has known about since 1999 when courses were computerized. Pressure to stop it, however, didn’t come until January 2008 when the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, reacting to published reports exposing rampant cheating through Web sites offering test answers, requested a congressional inquiry.

The Army responded by laying out a long list of initiatives that were to be implemented by mid-2008. But soldiers reached by Army Times say that cheating is as prevalent as ever. “Nothing’s changed. They haven’t cracked down,” Eckert said.

And now, almost two years after getting its marching orders to fix the problem, the Army is still at least six months away from a promised crackdown. Nevertheless, Army leaders insist that the changes will come and cheating will be much harder.

One immediate change in particular will affect a handful of soldiers.

The Army Training Support Center, which manages the courses, was scheduled on Sept. 25 to send the first-ever “incident reports” to the commanders of 20 soldiers, identified as suspected cheaters, for investigation and possible prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The soldiers were identified by a test security manager hired in August. Over a three-week period, she used forensic computer technology to scan public Web sites and compare compromised test materials and soldiers enrolled in a particular course.

The incident reports are intended to put the onus on a commander to enforce Army ethics, the crux of the issue behind the cheating scandal. The reports will identify soldiers by name, with any associated screen names, and list indicators that the soldier frequented cheating chat threads or Web sites.

It is not clear what resources commanders will be given to investigate the alleged cheating, and the request from Training and Doctrine Command to help resolve the “incident” is not mandatory because individual unit commanders are not in the TRADOC chain of command, TRADOC spokesman Harvey Perritt explained.

There is palpable anxiety at TRADOC about nailing these soldiers because of the potential that someone could be unjustly accused based on an appearance of misbehavior. And cheating has historically been hard to prove.

“There’s a name directly attached to the release of test material. That’s where we’re a little hesitant,” said Thomas Daley, chief of the Army Institute for Professional Development at Fort Eustis, Va., a part of the Army Training Support Center. “We’d like to send them out as a batch because I think if we can address this as a group of individuals we think we’ll be more successful in impressing upon the field the issue, and the problem as we see it, is a lack of Army values as we’re addressing it.”

The Army’s incident report informs commanders of the potential that a soldier in their command has had “an association” with “an incident of compromised Army test materials” and requests that commanders reply, saying that it “would be extremely helpful” in eliminating the compromise of the materials. Included with the incident report is a letter to remind soldiers of the ethics program.

In addition, the Army is also revamping its promotion system for sergeant and staff sergeant candidates, including a redistribution of points in the six achievement categories on the promotion point worksheet.

The changes will place greater emphasis on soldiering skills and experience, such as combat tours, marksmanship ability and physical fitness scores. For example, the section on points for military training, which is currently worth up to 100 points, will increase to 300 points.

Other changes to the Army Correspondence Course Program designed to minimize opportunities for cheating have taken place over the past year, and most of them will be evident starting in March.

• Web patrols by a team of contractors have identified six test-sharing Web sites that are now banned from .mil domains. More are expected to be banned as the patrols continue. The test security manager is a permanent civil service position.

• The 1,186 sub courses in the program have been reduced by 744. Many courses have been eliminated as obsolete, and others have been retrofitted with information reflecting the current operational environment with the input and validation of 22 Army proponencies, a process TRADOC says has taken an enormous amount of time and effort, contributing to the six-month projection for implementation.

• All courses and tests will be behind Common Access Card servers by migrating the material from the publicly accessible Reimer Digital Library into the Army Learning Management System, which is designated “for official use only.” The material will be off-limits and illegal for unauthorized users to post. All exams now being shared will be obsolete and will not apply to any of the migrated ACCP areas within six months, although they will remain publicly available.

• Test item banks are being established, creating a pool of more than 30,000 answers that will pop up randomly during tests. Contractors were hired to write three questions for each objective in the tests. So the size of the item bank has increased by three, which means it will be more difficult to have the same question come up over and over again even if the individual sees the test more than once.

• Soldiers will get credit for taking all the sub courses in one course category and in the future only for those that align with their specific MOS, once the migration is complete.

• The Army has established an e-mail address where soldiers can express concerns or ask questions about the tests — and presumably turn in fellow soldiers. The address of the Army test security office: atsc.accpsecurity@conus.army.mil.

Michelle predicted that the tougher measures planned by the Army would result in fewer promotions “for a while” because people won’t bother taking the courses.

As for the incident reports, she quipped, “Where will that get them? Most people cheat, so, if they’re looking for people going through classes quickly, that’s everyone.” She pointed to the officer in her own chain of command who encouraged her to cheat. “Are [the commanders] going to get in trouble, too? It’s an Army-wide thing.”

The Army correspondence courses have been around since the 1970s, and some of the exams have been around since then.

But Daley said he believes only a small fraction of soldiers are cheating.

“Many NCOs find the cheating abhorrent and are really opposed to what’s going on,” Daley said, citing chat threads on Army Knowledge Online.

The Army hopes the changes coming in the next six months will, at the very least, minimize cheating.

“They won’t be able to cheat as easily as in the past so you would expect the numbers to go down. We’ve made it harder, and we’re going to continue to make it hard,” Perritt said.

For Michelle, who said she plans to make a career in the Army, stopped cheating because she knew it was wrong.

“If they made the courses shorter and gave more credit for each class,” she said, “then more people would want to take it and they wouldn’t cheat.”

———

Bill is a soldier who recently was promoted to sergeant after four years in the Army.

He considers himself a good soldier with solid integrity, and although he had accomplished most of what he needed to ensure his promotion, his squad leader encouraged him to cheat on his correspondence courses to get more points. So he did.

Bill said he was handed a compact disc and used two personal computers — one to take the tests and the other to look at the answers simultaneously — to avoid detection if the Army did some kind of sweep for cheating.

Bill said he took so many tests he lost count, though “it still took a lot of time, even with the cheating system.”

“My integrity is a big part of why I didn’t want to use my name [for this article]. I don’t want to get caught, but it’s also about admitting I had to [cheat],” said Bill, who is in a combat support military occupational specialty and has no deployments.

Steve is an infantryman who took several correspondence courses related to his MOS, not because he needed the points, but because he was interested in learning something and said he likes to challenge himself to do more.

Still, he cheated because it was faster and he planned to learn what he could from seeing the answers.

“All you have to do is Google the answers. You type in the question, and Bam! the answer pops right up,” he said. “At least it shows you what the right answer is, but it’s not anything that would actually help me if I went to Pathfinder school.”

When he was in the Marine Corps, he said, he took a lot of correspondence courses and was allowed to take practice tests online, but the real test for credit was always done in a room before a proctor.

— Gina Cavallaro

The Massachusetts Democrat, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed concern that the Army Correspondence Course Program has been compromised by a proliferation of websites – some operated by active-duty Army personnel – that provide copies of and answer keys for hundreds of official military courses and more than 1,000 separate exams.

Kennedy was reacting to a Globe investigation published Sunday that found the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command has known for at least eight years that thousands of enlisted soldiers have been cheating to earn points for promotion to the rank of sergeant – a violation of at least three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Yet no soldiers have been prosecuted, nor has the training command implemented a series of common security measures recommended as early as 2001 by a group of computerized testing analysts convened by the Army, the Globe reported.

“The tests are obviously important in demonstrating that our soldiers have the knowledge needed to carry out their duties effectively. They also provide promotion points,” Kennedy told Geren in a letter dated yesterday. “I was shocked to read of one website that provides answer keys and boasts that “[w]ith cheap prices and fast service, you can be wearing that E-5 [sergeant] rank before you know it.”

Kennedy urged Geren “to implement stronger controls to make it more difficult to circumvent the integrity of the tests, such as by creating a larger pool of questions for each test and varying the questions given to each student, restricting the number of times a student can take each test, and using live proctors at a testing center for tests deemed important to the mission or to promotion.”

By Bryan Bender
Globe Staff / December 19, 2007
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/12/19/kennedy_urges_army_to_deter_cheating_on_promotional_exams/

CNN’s Veronica De La Cruz reports on allegations that U.S. soldiers are using the Internet to cheat on exams.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2007/12/17/lklv.army.test.cheating.cnn

In 1999, testing officials first noticed that soldiers were turning in many tests over a short period, something that would have been almost impossible without having obtained the answers ahead of time. A survey by the testing office showed that 5 percent of the exams were probably the subject of cheating. At the time, soldiers were filing roughly 200,000 exams per year.

But it wasn’t until June of this year, when an Army computer contractor complained about a website providing free copies of completed exams, that the Army acknowledged that it had a problem.

A five-month Globe investigation has since found that by then, hundreds of thousands of packages of completed exams had been downloaded by soldiers over many years.

But the Army never prosecuted anyone for cheating – which is a violation of three sections of the military code of justice.

In addition, the Globe found, the Army had been warned by a panel of experts it convened in 2001 that it needed to improve test security. But it did not act on the panel’s recommendation that the most important tests be given in a proctored classroom. Nor did it take even more modest steps, such as changing the questions at regular intervals to deter those who obtain the answers in advance.

Instead, as the Army put more of its correspondence courses online, the number of websites offering the answers to nearly 1,200 specialty exams grew continually, amid clear evidence that the people providing the answers were themselves Army personnel.

At the same time, the promotion points obtained through passing the online exams became a greater part of determining who gets made a sergeant, the rank often called the backbone of the Army.

This year, for example, soldiers who pass the exams can get more than half the points needed for promotion to infantry sergeant and more than a third of the points toward becoming a staff sergeant in a Patriot missile unit.

“As long as the Army, which has been well aware of this rampant problem for years, continues for one more day to use these exam results to award more money to soldiers [through promotions] the Army is promoting fraud,” said Lisa Conklin, a former enlisted soldier in Germany. She was one of dozens of soldiers and former soldiers who contacted the Globe expressing concern about cheating after stories appeared last summer.

Conklin said that cheating was “almost universal” in her unit, and that she was told it was none of her business when she tried to report it.

“The data to catch the cheaters is right there,” she said in an e-mailed response from Germany. “The Army has this data in their hands.”

During the eight years of Army inaction, the cheating problem grew steadily. The Globe investigation found that the cheating epidemic has involved tens of thousands of soldiers. Computer records from one site, called ShamSchool, created by the soldier who was the subject of news reports in July, show more than 200,000 downloads of packages containing the answers to multiple exams in just the 11 months from September 2006 to this past August. They included:

42,839 downloads of a package of engineering tests, covering subjects including explosives and demolitions, detecting mines, building trenches, and other forms of combat engineering;

19,570 downloads of a package of what the Army calls “interschool” exams, covering attack helicopter formations, chemical detection and contamination, and infantry field hygiene;

18,891 downloads of air defense artillery examinations; and

13,282 downloads of the course package for the Quartermaster Corps.

In August, commanders at the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in Kentucky ordered the soldier operating ShamSchool to take down the test materials. He did, but made the same information available on another site. Then, the day after he was allowed to leave the Army on a general discharge in October, he reposted the pirated exams on ShamSchool, which remains active.

But there are many other avenues for obtaining test results, including links on Yahoo and Google message boards, among other heavily trafficked websites. In August, a package of more than 830 Army examinations was offered for $24.99 on eBay.

In October a new service popped up: For a relatively modest fee, someone will take the exams for any soldier who agrees to pay.

The Army office that oversees the correspondence courses and testing program is located in a former World War II-era helicopter hangar in a distant corner of Fort Eustis, near Norfolk, Va. The neglected headquarters reflect what some staff members say is a larger lack of commitment by the Army, especially during the Iraq war. Since late 2004, testing officials say, the office staff has been cut from 20 to 13.

It was here, in 1999, that a civilian program analyst named Alvin Kahn first spotted an odd pattern in the test results: Some soldiers were submitting exams covering hundreds of hours of coursework in a relatively short period of time. Since the exams were supposed to be taken only after months of studying the course materials, the rapid filing of tests could mean only one thing: Soldiers had the answers and were quickly filling in exam after exam.

The Army Correspondence Course Program is designed to help soldiers learn new military skills and thereby obtain promotion points to become sergeants. Soldiers who choose to enroll in the courses – they are not required – can download their own copies of instruction materials. The soldiers are expected to spend an assigned number of hours learning the material, ranging from 1 to 64. The higher the number of course hours, the more promotion points are earned.

After completing the course, students take an online exam. If they fail, they may take it again, multiple times. But the tests require that soldiers always certify, by clicking an icon, that they “have not had access to copies of answer sheets or solutions from others.” The exams also warn students that cheating is a crime.

After Kahn’s discovery that students were turning in multiple tests over a short period, he conducted a “quality control check” in which he reviewed how many tests had been filed by each soldier over various time periods. He determined that about 5 percent of the tests were probably compromised.

Later, as a further check of the system, Kahn changed the order of questions on some tests over a weekend. Soldiers with pirated answer keys filled in tests in the wrong order and failed. The following Monday the office was flooded with complaints from soldiers convinced that their exams had been misgraded by the Army computer.

But the office lacked the authority to go after the cheaters. Under the military justice system, alleged criminal violations are investigated by the unit of the soldier who is implicated. So whenever testing officials heard about evidence of cheating, they referred it to the soldiers’ units, said Connie Wardell, the civilian official who has overseen the testing program since 2005.

The individual units, however, balked at taking action. Interviews with dozens of soldiers – some of whom did not want their full names disclosed for fear of retribution – suggest that cheating was tolerated by commanders, who didn’t want to engage in time-consuming and unpopular investigations.

In fact, the testing office acknowledged, there is no evidence that any violators were formally punished by the different units between 1999 and this fall.

“As much as we ask what happened [to the suspected soldier], we often never hear anything back,” said Marilyn Hicok, a testing official at Fort Eustis.

Last summer the Army computer contractor who complained about ShamSchool said he contacted the Army Criminal Investigation Division headquarters about taking action against cheaters. But CID headquarters declined to investigate.

The cheating allegations do “not meet the criminal threshold investigated by CID,” said spokesman Christopher Grey. Despite Grey’s assertion, no one in the Army disputes that cheating is a violation of military law, and the Air Force last year prosecuted three airmen, including a 19-year veteran, for running a 10-year cheating ring that supplied answers to promotion exams; two were sentenced to multiyear prison terms.

In the Army, however, cheaters haven’t been prosecuted. The testing office said it knows of no cases of soldiers receiving administrative punishments, either, until action was taken against the ShamSchool operator last summer. Then, this fall, the testing office persuaded a unit in Kuwait to invalidate the test results of four soldiers who used answer keys on their correspondence course exams.

In 2001 the training command brought together 33 officials from across the Army and the private sector to discuss ways to improve the security of its online learning system, which includes the Army Correspondence Course Program as well as other training programs. Among the participants were representatives from the Sergeants Major Academy, the Judge Advocate General’s School, the National Guard Bureau, the Army War College, and many outside test-security experts.

The group met at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and concluded that the growing reliance on online testing “increases the odds of various types of training compromise, such as obtaining questions beforehand or enlisting a proxy” to take the exams, according to the Army’s official report on the session.

The report added: “In the Army, the consequences of training compromise can be severe. For example, soldiers considered qualified to perform a task may not be, increasing the chances of ‘human error’ during an operation.”

The experts recommended that the Army explore a variety of tools to minimize cheating, including creating a large pool of questions for each test and then varying the ones given to each student; restricting the number of times a student could take any particular test; and using live proctors in testing centers to administer those exams considered “high stakes,” in which the consequences of not knowing the material would be severe.

One participant in the session, Ray Nicosia, director of security for Educational Testing Service, the world’s largest test delivery company, said in an interview that he has the same advice today for the Army that he offered in 2001: Any high-stakes test should be administered by a proctor at a testing center.

“That was my recommendation to this organization six years ago, and that’s my recommendation today,” said Nicosia, who oversees the computer-based graduate school entrance exams, as well as the SAT and Advanced Placement tests for high school students.

Officials at the Army testing office acknowledge that they did not implement most of the group’s recommendations, mainly because of a lack of resources. The only safeguards currently in place, according to testing officials, are a mechanism that changes the order of questions on the exams – but not the questions themselves, which is what the experts recommended; a mechanism that limits students’ ability to print the exams – though officials acknowledge that there is a way around it; and a reminder of the program’s honor code at the beginning and end of the exams.

More than a half-dozen specialists in online testing interviewed by the Globe said the Army’s program does not meet current security standards in the testing world.

“If the military’s serious about this, they can solve this,” said Randall T. Trask, an Army veteran and vice president of Pearson Vue, a consulting firm on computer-based learning.

But even Army officials acknowledge that they haven’t made test security a priority.

“We do the best we can when there are no additional resources,” said Colonel James C. Markley, the senior officer in charge of the testing center. “This [correspondence-course] program is one that hasn’t gotten a lot of additional help in recent years.”

Markley said he believes the responsibility for failing to take action against cheating lies with the individual units, even though he understands why it might not be a priority for commanders.

“The beauty of the military is every commander has to make decisions about what to prosecute and how,” Markley said. “Every commander out there is deciding, ‘Is this the highest priority for my attention?’ ”

Even now, he said, he has not been asked by his superiors to take action to safeguard the tests.

“Nobody has come to me and said, ‘Solve this problem,’ ” he said.

General William Wallace, the four-star general in charge of all Army training, declined through a spokesman to answer any questions about cheating.

Evidence of the extent of cheating has been viewable for eight years online, making it an “open secret” in the view of dozens of soldiers interviewed.

As early as 1999, cheating on Army Correspondence Course Program tests was discussed on at least three Google message boards, the Globe investigation found.

On the message boards, soldiers exchanged information about tests, discussed ways to beat the system, and, in some cases, were rebuked by other soldiers.

“The answers are in the textbooks,” wrote one soldier in 2000, scolding an Army medic who had asked for copies of the test answers. “Try learning the material – your troops may someday have their welfare depend on your being able to do your job. If you have to cheat, then you should not ever get promoted. Let somebody who can actually do the job get the stripes.”

Since at least 2001, there also have been message boards for sharing Army exam answers on Yahoo. Currently, there are more than a half-dozen, with titles like Army Correspondence Course Knowledge, Army Correspondence, and Promotion Points. One message board has 900 registered members, posting and downloading completed exams.

A website dedicated solely to selling Army test answers, Armyfocus.com, came online in 2005 and is currently run by an operator based at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

In 2006, a disgruntled soldier named Adam Chrysler started ShamSchool, which offered hundreds of copies of completed exams for free – under the motto “soldiers helping soldiers.”

Chrysler said in an interview that he wanted to make it easier for his comrades to get promoted more quickly.

ShamSchool was so popular in the ranks that within six months it had over 2 million hits – with thousands of new visitors coming every week.

In June, ShamSchool caught the attention of an Army computer contractor, who demanded that Chrysler’s division, the 101st Airborne, conduct an investigation.

In July, after a Globe story revealed the existence of ShamSchool, Chrysler’s commander ordered him to remove the materials. He did, but transferred all the copies of the tests to another site. Then, after being allowed to leave the Army in October under a general discharge, he put the exams back on ShamSchool.

The division’s investigation, conducted by Captain Carlos G. Garth, was completed at the end of July. It had sweeping findings, and called for an Armywide probe, but no such probe has been launched.

The report concluded that ShamSchool had “facilitated thousands of downloads of actual Army Correspondence Course Program exams complete with answers, which were subsequently used to cheat on [correspondence-course] exams.”

In one week in July 2007, for example, 20,100 “unique visitors” logged into ShamSchool, accessing 148,066 page views. At that point a total of 425,847 unique visitors had logged on, accessing 2,847,496 page views, Garth reported. More people visited ShamSchool than have been enrolled in the correspondence-course program this year – 313,127 – attesting to the extent to which cheating has become embedded in the testing system.

Garth himself downloaded a copy of the answers to a test of how to maintain the radar system on a Patriot missile, and took the exam. He reported that he had not studied and had “no retainable knowledge of the subject matter.”

Minutes later, he received an e-mail from the testing center at Fort Eustis informing him he had scored a “superior” 96 percent, earning 24 credit hours, the equivalent of 4.8 promotion points for a soldier aspiring to be a sergeant.

He also found that having the test answers available raised national-security concerns. It “may potentially expose tactical and technical vulnerabilities” to those “intent on disrupting US interests,” he concluded.

Garth sought help in his investigation from the local military police and CID, but both refused, claiming that cheating was beyond their purview. In the 18 days he was given to complete his probe, Garth said, he was not able to identify the cheaters.

“This investigation was not able to secure the identities of other military personnel participating in the content sharing at www.ShamSchool.com,” he wrote. “Moreover, other agencies either declined or were unable to provide assistance in support of a more detailed investigation.”

But the Globe, using relatively simple computer tracking skills, was able to locate the identities of dozens of soldiers who frequent ShamSchool and other websites.

For example, the “document properties” of exam copies found on ShamSchool identify the soldiers who last saved them on their computer.

Among them were soldiers at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina; the 18th Medical Command in Seoul, South Korea; the National Guard Bureau outside of Washington; the US Army Recruiting Command in St. Louis; Army headquarters in the Pentagon; Fort Benning, Ga.; and Fort Wainwright, Alaska.

On the Yahoo message boards many users have provided their e-mail addresses and the bases where they are stationed, including one woman who identified herself as the spouse of a soldier who was completing the tests on his behalf.

The Globe was also able to identify at least half a dozen of the most active website “moderators” who guide soldiers to the cheating materials. They include at least four active-duty sergeants based around the world, an Army contractor, and a retired soldier.

In addition, it is clear that some soldiers have used government computers to cheat, which is a separate crime under the Uniformed Code of Military Justice, and makes the downloads of pirated exams even more easily traceable by investigators.

But there is still no official Armywide investigation, according to the training command.

Garth recommended that the training command undertake “further investigation and action regarding the extent of cheating.” But Markley, who oversees the testing program, said he has never been given a copy of Garth’s report.

“I’m not aware of it, no,” Markley said.

The only one of Garth’s recommendations that has been implemented is the blocking of ShamSchool from military computers at various bases. But anyone wanting to cheat can consult the new site on Freewebs.com, which will take the exams for soldiers for a fee.

“This site is made for soldiers that do not have enough time on their own and are held back from rank because of promotion points,” the website announces on its homepage. “We strive to offer the best, fastest, and 100% completely safe way to max those [correspondence-course] points.”

The site charges 50 cents per promotion point – $100 for the maximum 200 points – and claims a soldier can complete the maximum number of ACCP courses in about two weeks.

“With cheap prices and fast service, you can be wearing that E-5 [sergeant] rank before you know it,” the site advertises.

The Army sergeant is the first leader that an Army private encounters in boot camp. Sergeants train soldiers to operate weapons, build fortifications, and go into battle. Sergeants also handle desk jobs, from dispensing Army paychecks to keeping the troops armed, fed, and clothed.

The Army maintains an elaborate process for selecting its sergeants, what it calls a “values-based, merit promotion” system.

Soldiers can gain promotion points for competence, military bearing, leadership, training, and responsibility and accountability, based on the assessments of the soldiers’ commanders and a separate promotion board. Candidates also can get points for weapons proficiency, awards and decorations, and civilian education.

But soldiers can also gain up to 200 points from the correspondence courses. And lately, those 200 points, obtained through online exams, can count for more than half the points needed to become a sergeant.

Each month, the Army Human Resources Command forecasts the number of vacancies and adjusts the number of points required for promotion.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – with a near-constant demand for sergeants – have driven down the point totals necessary for promotion in certain specialties.

For example, only 386 points were required for a specialist to be promoted to an infantry sergeant in October, down from 424 in September, records show. The numbers of points to qualify for the position of staff sergeant in a Patriot missile unit dropped from 662 in September to 502 in October, according to Army data.

In addition, the required points for sergeants in the signal corps, tank units, and intelligence branch have all been lowered dramatically because of personnel shortages.

Soldiers have been quick to note that the points gained from online tests take on greater importance as the total points needed for promotion decline.

The online courses are “even more significant if the required points drop to a lesser number,” said John Robinson, an Army chief warrant officer who completed a dissertation on the correspondence-course program in 2003.

Cheating, Robinson said, also becomes more tempting. “Enlisted folks who cheat in this manner are committing a greater crime, by being promoted under false pretenses and thereby exposing our Army to . . . young noncommissioned officers and leaders with suspect moral values,” he said in an interview.

But cheating has become institutionalized in many units, according to interviews with Army officials, enlisted soldiers, and civilian experts.

Sergeant Daniel Meridieth said in an e-mail that his superior officer directed him to ShamSchool. “I got the Web address from my platoon sergeant, who suggested it as a ‘study guide.’ And my first sergeant has said many times that ‘If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t trying hard enough,’ ” a catchphrase that also appears frequently on the message boards of the cheating websites.

Another sergeant, James Vesta, called the cheating on correspondence courses “pandemic.”

“I don’t know anyone who hasn’t cheated on the Army correspondence course system, and I know a lot of people,” he said.

But not all soldiers go along with it. The websites are rife with discussion forums in which soldiers bitterly argue about cheating.

Still, the promotion points – and the roughly $150 per month salary increase for active-duty soldiers seeking to become sergeants – are attractive, and many can’t resist the lure of quick advancement.

One soldier who declined to be identified said he “boycotted” the online courses “in disgust with the way that the dishonest soldiers were manipulating them.” But, he said, “Finally, I gave in to the fact that . . . it would be extremely difficult to be promoted otherwise.”

Many people in the military world – from retirees to contractors to active-duty officers – express alarm about the cheating.

“We have a warrior ethos of morals and ethics, and these people are not following our Army values,” said Sergeant Major Richard Rosen, a senior instructor at the Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas. “They should be punished.”

But most acknowledge that the Army’s complicated command structure means little will change without pressure from the top brass. And the training command is already dealing with an influx of new soldiers, increasing numbers of whom have not met the standards the Army has long sought to maintain for physical fitness, educational attainment, and lack of criminal records.

With the Army accepting less-qualified recruits, some officers say, the top brass is unlikely to start trying to root out what most believe is a massive number of cheaters. Meanwhile, the pace of promotions has quickened. Now it can take as little as two years from the time soldiers enter as privates until they become a sergeant, Rosen said. By contrast, it took him nearly five years to become a sergeant after he entered in 1979.

With the system straining, even Markley, who oversees the testing office, doubts that there will be much money forthcoming to deal with the cheating problem. Still, the civilians in the office, led by Wardell, hope to make improvements. She said the office recently hired consultants to begin rewriting test questions. They’ve also applied for funds to “help identify potential cheaters” and the people supplying them with completed tests.

Markley remains skeptical, warning that funds in wartime tend to go to “people pulling triggers,” not people involved in training. But, he said, “I haven’t anguished over any of this.”

At bottom, he said, the cheaters will have to answer to their own consciences: “My personal perspective is this is about honor and integrity – the ability to say ‘This is my work.’ As long as there’s a way to cheat, people will cheat. All we can do is make it harder for them to cheat. We can’t stop them from cheating.”

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
By Bryan Bender and Kevin Baron
Globe Correspondent / December 16, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/12/16/army_knew_of_cheating_on_tests_for_eight_years/

6.  POINT OF CONTACT FOR THIS MESSAGE IS THE JUNIOR ENLISTED PROMOTION BRANCH, DSN 221-8010, OR COMMERCIAL 703-325-8010.

This originally aired on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 on MSNBC Live.

Jack Jacobs is an MSNBC military analyst. He is a retired U.S. Army colonel. He earned the Medal of Honor for exceptional heroism on the battlefields of Vietnam and also has three Bronze Stars and two Silver Stars.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20137538/

“Transcript of the MSNBC Interview”

The U.S. Army is now investigating whether thousands of soldiers cheated on exams that are designed to help them get promotions. Multiple websites reportedly provide the answers to test questions and those sites are still up and running despite the investigation.

Retired Army Colonel Jack Jacobs is an MSNBC military analyst.

Alright Colonel, the kicker here is the Army reportedly knew about this problem six years ago. So, why is it still happening?

Well, I think they probably suspected that they were going to have trouble. Anytime you enter into the computer world and you start accessing information you have objective examinations whose information can be moved from computer to computer. You’re going to have that kind of problem. And the U.S. Army is not the only institution with that difficulty. Universities around the globe have the same problem, both with regular course work and with entrance examinations. Anytime you have any standardized test and you’re using any kind of electronic means to take the exam and score it you’re going to have the problem that the Army is having and it doesn’t matter that it’s taken six years to figure out that they’ve got a difficulty. They got to fix it right now.

Yeah, and you know, here’s the thing, the first thing I thought of when I heard about this. How would I feel if my brother or my nephew was at war and I thought that he was being led by somebody who got to that position not because they’re smart and they’re well trained, but because they are at the heart of them, a cheater.

Well, that’s precisely the problem. There are u’; there are about three different components to the decision to promote somebody. One is past performance, the evaluation by your supervisor. One is a field test, to demonstrate your capability to do the next higher level job, in your military occupational specialty. And one is this kind of test. But you’re absolutely right, we have to have thee best people we possibly can to lead our young troops, because most of them are going to be in combat. We don’t want to mess around with stuff like this.

So, how deep could this go? And, I mean, how much could it hurt the force?

But, I think, if it’s true that we have people who are not qualified to lead who are currently leading. Then we’ve got the problem right now. But, I think the Army knows it has a problem we’ll fair it out the difficulty. The hard part now is fixing it. How are you going to make sure the tests that your troops are taking are going to be bona fide, evaluations objectively of what their capabilities are? This is not hard work, you can do it. But, you got to set your mind to doing it.

Yeah, and I guess the other thing is that, in, no one feels that our troops make enough money.

No.

I mean you put yourself in harms way whether you’re, you know a firefighter or you’re fighting in Iraq.

You can’t pay people enough money to do this kind of stuff.

But the thought that you’re paying somebody who’s getting that money in a way that’s crooked is a little bit upsetting. Especially for people who are doing it the straight and narrow.

I think the military is going to sort it out, because they have to sort it out. The military itself does not want anything but the best leading the best of their, their troops. They will find a way to do; there is a way to do it. You just have to set your mind to making sure that the way of taking the test, the information that’s going on the test and coming out is answers is inviolate. It just takes some effort to do so.

OK, thanks Colonel.

You’re welcome.

For more on the Army cheating investigation you can check out Colonel Jacobs latest column on our website. That is MSNBC.com

A tip to a Web site called Shamschool.com revealed that soldiers can get answers to correspondence-course tests. Passing those courses can earn soldiers points on their promotion-point worksheets.

The Fort Campbell soldier behind the Web site was not punished. He was given a letter of counseling and ordered to remove the test answers, with threats of punishment if he failed to do so; he complied.

the case, first reported by the Boston Globe, publicly reveals what is an open secret in the Army: The system for promoting soldiers to sergeant and staff sergeant is wide open to cheating.

Shamschool.com claimed 10,000 members, and even after the answers were removed, a visitor could easily find instances of soldiers seeking help with correspondence courses. There are numerous other Web sites that also offer Army correspondence courses and test answers. Soldiers told Army Times that cheating is rampant ‘ and all but institutionalized.

Yet the Army is doing little as an institution to stop it. The effort, by all accounts, is piecemeal, with officials addressing individual cases as they pop up ‘ and with a surprisingly soft touch.

They concede they have been hard-pressed to stay ahead of the problem as the rapid expansion and popularity of the Internet has created a new universe of opportunity for cheaters, one in which the wrongdoers can operate remotely and anonymously.

The Army is looking at everything from randomizing test questions to administering proctored exams, but has yet to develop a comprehensive plan to kill the open opportunity to cheat through the correspondence-course section. Meanwhile, soldiers who played by the rules get outscored by those who cheated.

That’s unacceptable, and Army leadership is complicit until it takes meaningful steps to end it. The Marine Corps faced a similar problem last year and attacked it by instituting changes demanded by the top down.

It’s time for the Army to take similar action.

http://www.armytimes.com/community/opinion/army_editorial_cheating_070806/

The documents show that beginning in September 2006, the Army’s own computer technicians began monitoring soldiers’ usage of shamschool.com, the unauthorized website that is at the center of an investigation into whether thousands of soldiers are cheating on the Army Correspondence Course Program, known as ACCP.

On July 25, the soldier who operates that site, Specialist Adam Chrysler, was ordered to remove the materials after superiors in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., were tipped off that they were downloaded by soldiers at Army bases from Germany to Alaska.

But less than a week after ordering Chrysler to remove the material from his website, copies of the tests and answer keys have appeared on at least three other websites. In direct protest of the order, another soldier set up a message forum on Google to post the data. The intent was clear: The soldier, Sergeant Micah Smith, who is based at Fort Benning, Ga., called the new site ShamSchoolx2.

The refusal by some soldiers to cease sharing the exams and answers presents a new challenge to Army officials seeking to maintain the integrity of the service’s promotion system. But official documents show that the Army shouldn’t be surprised.

Authorities warned the Army on numerous occasions that portions of its online learning system are vulnerable to cheating — in direct violation of regulations and possible military law, according to official military documents and reports.

The correspondence courses are designed to help soldiers expand their military knowledge in a host of areas, such as battlefield tactics and weaponry. They are also used by noncommissioned officers, the sergeants considered the backbone of the enlisted ranks, to gain points needed for promotion; up to 20 percent of the points they need to earn higher rank come from ACCP courses. In some cases, the coursework is also accepted as college credit.

There were warnings that the system could be compromised dating back to when the Army first began widespread use of online courses in the late 1990s.

Specialists at a workshop to enhance the Army’s use of online education programs, which the military convened in 2001 at Carnegie Mellon University, warned that “the increased use of computer technology for distributed learning systems . . . increases the odds of various forms of training compromise, such as obtaining questions beforehand or enlisting a proxy for test taking,” according to an official synopsis by the Army Research Institute.

Then in 2005, another group of academics and private “distributed learning” specialists the Army asked for advice laid out a series of recommendations it said would help safeguard the integrity of the Army’s online education system, including redesigning some tests and monitoring soldiers while they complete their courses.

“The increased use of distributed learning, coupled with reports of increased frequency of cheating among high school students and college students, is reason for concern,” the specialists warned. Yet, the Army did not use the additional security measures the specialists recommended.

The Army soon had its own evidence of widespread cheating.

From the time the ShamSchool site first went online last year, the Army was aware soldiers were using the answer keys posted there to complete their ACCP courses, according to the documents an Army insider provided to the Globe.

The data, compiled by the Army Training Support Center, show that ShamSchool was among the top websites, or “referral domains,” soldiers viewed immediately before logging on to the Army’s official website that administers the ACCP courses.

The Army investigation into allegations of widespread cheating, first reported by the Globe, began July 12 after officials at Fort Campbell were alerted that Chrysler was running the ShamSchool website there.

The military’s investigating officer has conducted interviews, gathered statements from soldiers, and collected other evidence, according to Lieutenant Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the 101st Airborne Division.

“The review of the findings is ongoing, and no determination has been made,” she said. “Then there’s the legal review before any action . . . is taken.”

But the announcement of the ongoing probe has not deterred a committed group of computer-savvy soldiers running more than a dozen test-and-answers websites from continuing a practice the Army says violates its regulations, and, possibly, military law. Because ShamSchool was the most prominent, it became the focus of the Army investigation, but officials predict the probe probably will expand to the other websites.

A few days after Smith created the Google message board, another website, politicalgroundzero.com, appeared and began posting the ACCP tests and answers. Yet another site, accpguide.com, popped up earlier this week.

The ShamSchool site, meanwhile, remains online and now provides a link to the other sites that post the test information. Its message boards have also become a sounding board for protests against the Army for ordering the ACCP test data removed.

“The answers have been handed down since the inception of ACCP,” wrote a site moderator who uses the moniker “Ibizian” and says he is based in Germany.

“Be it old-school paper courses to the newer online versions. . . . This website has only placed those same documents into one place for all to see,” he wrote.

Still, other current and former soldiers who contacted the Globe after news spread of the Army investigation said they have long struggled with the knowledge that many soldiers are getting the answers to the ACCP exams.

“This cheating to become NCO and then go higher as NCO is almost universal,” said one Army sergeant who retired recently.

She said the lack of integrity in the ACCP and promotion system penalizes soldiers who do their own work.

“It’s a severe equal-opportunity problem . . . when a soldier who refuses to cheat gets passed over and treated like garbage in favor of the people who do cheat.”

By Kevin Baron and Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent And Globe Staff | August 3, 2007

Baron can be reached at kbaron@globe.com. Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/08/03/documents_say_army_knew_of_exam_cheating/

Army officials said the investigation so far is limited to Fort Campbell, where a soldier with the 101st Airborne Division was counseled in connection with a Web site he ran, Shamschool.com.

Fort Campbell officials began the investigation on a tip.

The site bills itself as ‘soldiers helping soldiers,’ and much of the message traffic appears to be legitimate knowledge sharing. But soldiers also openly exchanged answers to Army Correspondence Course Program tests, enabling them to cheat then falsely claim points for successful completion on their promotion worksheets.

Shamschool.com is just one of numerous Web sites where soldiers can go to get copies of correspondence course tests and answers. Although the probe into the known case at Fort Campbell has ended, investigators there are asking additional questions that could lead to a wider look at a cheating problem the Army acknowledges is nothing new.

‘It’s like any investigation. If they find out it involves persons or actions that are outside the scope of this investigation, it could spill over and be passed up to the appropriate authority,’ division spokeswoman Lt. Col. Rumi Nielsen-Green told Army Times, adding, ‘It’s far from over.’

Soldiers up for sergeant and staff sergeant are scored on a promotion worksheet and earn points for everything from weapons qualifications to physical fitness test performance, decorations and education.

The latter category includes points for successful correspondence course completion. At any given time, there are 30,000 specialists, corporals and sergeants vying for promotion, according to Human Resources Command.

Senior NCOs have complained that the system not only is vulnerable to cheating, but is so loosely managed that it allows soldiers to take courses that are unrelated to their career field and do not contribute to their professional development.

‘There’s just no discipline in the system,’ said a command sergeant major who requested anonymity.

‘It’s good that it promotes self-development, but an infantryman may be taking courses that have nothing to do with leadership and being an infantryman,’ he said.

A senior officer at the Pentagon said any allegations of cheating are taken seriously by the Army and will be looked at once Fort Campbell makes its final conclusions.

‘Depending on the results of the AR 15-6 investigation and the recommendations that come from that, we would not rule out looking further,’ Army spokesman Col. Dan Baggio said. ‘But it’s very, very premature at this time to speculate and jump to conclusions.’

The Shamschool operator, Spc. Adam Chrysler, was counseled July 25 after a 15-6 investigation and early the next day posted the actual counseling form on his site with a note titled ‘R.I.P. Shamschool’ next to a giant drawing of a crying rabbit.

‘This counseling was strict and to the point,’ Chrysler, who works in the 159th Combat Aviation Brigade, said in his note. ‘I am sorry to have to disappoint you all, but I am following orders.’

He declined to comment for this story, saying he had been ordered not to speak to the media about the case, first reported by The Boston Globe.

The counseling form from his company commander, whose name is blurred out in the online posting, identifies Chrysler as the webmaster of Shamschool.com, ‘which permits posting of ACCP exams complete with answers.’

‘Enabling soldiers to cheat on ACCP exams … undermines the integrity of the Army,’ the commander said, ordering the tests and answers removed.

But Shamschool.com, which claims 10,000 members and 500,000 hits a day, is still active, and its discussion forum with soldiers sharing advice, experiences and support, continues as usual.

Discussions are wide ranging.

One soldier asked for advice on how to begin training for Special Forces selection; another said she was told by her chain of command she couldn’t go before a board because she was pregnant, but her chain was wrong, as confirmed by a host of other soldiers, one of whom had been pregnant when she went before a board.

But the site’s most popular feature, and the one that drew the investigation after a defense contractor and former noncommissioned officer alerted Army authorities in June, was the section where soldiers posted the answers to tests from the Army Correspondence Course Program.

During a browse on the site the day Chrysler was ordered to remove the answers, two messages popped up from soldiers seeking answers to specific ACCP exams.

Soldiers were sharing the answers to hundreds of ACCP tests in a free trade market, with a level of comfort that had some identifying themselves with their Army Knowledge Online addresses.

But the practice, according to discussion among soldiers, as well as Army officials in charge of online testing, is as old as the hills, and Shamschool.com is not alone.

‘An important thing to remember is that ever since there have been tests, there has been cheating,’ said Col. Jim Markley, head of Army Distributed Learning Program, who recalled that as a new lieutenant assigned to Fort Campbell more than 20 years ago ‘there were paper tests passed around.’

‘Now,’ he said, ‘with the more automated way of testing, my end of the bargain is to try to stay one step ahead.’

But that’s no small task, according to a Shamschool.com moderator, who gave the Army credit for working to make it harder to cheat on the tests and said he counsels soldiers against cheating.

‘The cheat sites are everywhere, they’re all over the place,’ said Sgt. Micah Smith, one of seven moderators at Shamschool.com, which he described as a place soldiers can go to help each other with much more than tests.

‘We’ve turned into the largest soldier Web site out there,’ Smith said, recalling being handed a three-ring binder eight years ago by an NCO at his first unit of assignment, which contained all the tests and answers to ACCP courses.

As computerized information became the norm, he explained, soldiers passed it around on compact discs and thumb drives. Smith said he has never cheated on a test.

At least 14 ‘cheat sites’ are easily found on the Web, many claiming hundreds of members and advertising free file sharing for Army correspondence courses.

The proliferation of Web-based cheat sites underscores the challenge faced by the Army as it moves to make career opportunities for soldiers available online.

‘This has been an ongoing problem over the years,’ Carol Washington, chief of Individual Training Support based at Fort Eustis, Va., said in an e-mail. ‘We report incidents where we find out about Web sites identified with test exams and answers to [Criminal Investigation Command]. However, often times it is difficult for them to prove that there was malicious intent.’

The problem is not unique to the Army. The Marine Corps last year vigorously cracked down on widespread exam cheating.

The Army, Washington explained, is considering several options to try to stay one step ahead of a generation of soldiers who are skilled at maneuvering Web-based programs.

Randomized test questions, a larger pool of test items, timed exams or proctored exams are being looked at, she said, but with the rate of deployment among soldiers it would be unfair to burden them with the responsibility of having to find an education center or other designated location.

The Army, she said, is transitioning to a more robust and potentially more secured Army Learning Management System, in which guidelines for testing could eliminate the use of instant messaging, e-mailing and printing test questions.

‘In cases where persons are found guilty of cheating, publicizing the consequence may make others think twice before they do this,’ she said.

‘Whatever we implement as a deterrent, there is someone out there who figures out a way to circumvent the security measures that are in place,’ she said.

Staff writer Jim Tice contributed to this report.

By Gina Cavallaro – gcavallaro@militarytimes.com
Posted : August 06, 2007

http://www.armytimes.com/issues/stories/0-ARMYPAPER-2924360.php

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