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Watching through a camera, a proctor monitors a Chinese student taking an English exam. Sitting in a Beijing living room, the student appears to be taking the test seriously. They frown during the listening session, as if trying hard to think about the answer. And for the written portion, their arms move about, with the tapping of a keyboard being heard.
But the student wasn’t typing anything. They weren’t even looking at the screen. Sitting next to the student, just outside of the camera’s field of view, was 34-year-old Tony Wang. As he’d done for dozens of students before, Wang was answering the questions by typing on a wireless keyboard, sometimes while eating barbecued skewers. For the speaking portion, he’d type the answers on an iPad or a smartphone for students to read out. And students who couldn’t speak English at all would silently move their lips while Wang invisibly spoke aloud the answer on their behalf.
Wang, who runs an agency that helps Chinese students study abroad, told Rest of World he had helped more than 100 students cheat on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (Toefl) exam since at-home tests became available in 2020. “To insiders like us, ETS online testing is just a joke,” Wang said. (ETS, or Educational Testing Service, is the New Jersey-based company that administers Toefl and the GRE graduate school entry exam.)
