Washington

Tens of thousands of students from four Asian countries are to be barred from taking part in the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) general test online after their compatriots were found cheating in it.

Administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the exam tests skills, such as mathematics and English-language ability, of graduate school entrants in the United States. The ETS says that students in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea will have to take paper versions of the test this autumn, after officials uncovered large-scale cheating on the verbal section of the online GRE.

The ETS says it unearthed two websites where students had posted questions and answers that they had memorized while taking the test. These questions had been used many times in the online test. Participation in the test is required by most US graduate schools as part of candidates' admission applications.

The ETS will not say how many students accessed the websites. But its spokesman Tom Ewing says that the cheating was confined to the four countries where students will now have to take the paper test. More than 55,000 students took the computer-based GRE last year in the four countries, and Ewing says that a “substantial number of students” must have cheated, as average scores for the verbal section rose by as much as 100 points during a single testing cycle. Each section is graded on a 200–800-point scale.

But some graduate students are concerned that the paper GRE will not be directly comparable to the online version to be taken by students in the rest of the world. “The ETS should investigate and clarify the extent of cheating, so that students would not be suspected unnecessarily,” says Ying Wong, a graduate student in psychology and member of the graduate student council at Stanford University in California. “It would be very damaging to the general Asian student population's morale if they feel their reputation cannot be cleared,” Wong says.