Study Raid

Accusers say A Plus fails legal, ethics test

Businessman denies buying stolen exams for use as study aids

Published: Sunday, May 28, 2006 ELLIOTT BLACKBURN
AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

Modern cheaters use gadgets such as cell phones, but his accusers said Shaik Ahmed’s sources kept it simple.

Take a seat. Grab a test. Run.

Texas Tech has accused Ahmed, the owner of A Plus Review and Tutoring, of offering students little academic guidance – but all the answers to the next day’s test.

Ahmed is scheduled to negotiate a plea in June for a charge of theft less than $50 after an exam that disappeared from a Rawls College of Business Administration class in November turned up in his business’s study materials the next day.

In what Tech investigators and academic ethics staff called an “unusual” case, an impromptu undercover sting run by business school faculty and students led to the school’s first criminal complaint about stolen tests.

Ahmed said he doesn’t steal exams or solicit pilfered ones. But Tech seemed exasperated by an academic gray area.

“This is a university-wide problem,” said Catherine Duran, business school assistant dean for undergraduate studies. “But our college is really getting hammered by this.”

Professor Phillip Flamm’s investigation began in November when a test-taker vanished with a copy of his exam.

A man came into Flamm’s business class, sat down at a desk, took a copy of the test and began to fill out an answer sheet.

He was gone before the classmate next to him could answer the first question.

“The guy just took the test, left the Scantron and walked out the door,” Flamm said.

So Flamm sent three students to find it. The professor had them study his exam and then the business school paid for a look at the test packet Ahmed’s business offered the day after the test disappeared.

Flamm’s tests are based on real-time business events, he said, so it would be impossible for an exam from a prior year to help any students.

The packet A Plus provided had the same questions in a different order, Flamm’s students reported.

“He told us he had the exact test we were to be taking and that we should call our family and all of our friends and tell them we were going to make A’s,” one student wrote in a witness affidavit.

A Plus Review’s Web site promises help for more than 230 classes at Tech, 65 courses at Lubbock Christian University, 64 courses at South Plains College and 24 courses at Wayland Baptist University.

About 100 students a semester seek A Plus for help, Ahmed said. The business offers help on grade levels from elementary school to college, he said.

A big part of his business are his test-prep packets, which he does not allow to be taken out of the business and cost $50 per hour spent with each packet. He pulls together materials based on course syllabi, textbooks and tests students bring in, he said.

Ahmed trades discounts on his study aids for the tests students hand over, he said. He does not ask the students where the exams came from, he said.

“Just like you go to a pawn shop or you go to a bookstore and sell your books back,” Ahmed said by telephone from Houston last week. “At the end of the semester I’ve got students who bring their tests back, also.”

Ahmed said he doesn’t remember the test or the discussion that the students in the witness affidavit wrote about. He tells customers whatever the person who traded in the test told him, he said.

But he laughed at the suggestion that he would pay people to steal tests. Nobody stole tests on his behalf, and he would not buy tests he knew to be stolen, he said.

“We cover about 200 sections and that’s impossible,” Ahmed said. “And besides, it’s unethical.”

Flamm never had someone walk off with a test before, he said, but it was not the first time business school faculty had trouble with A Plus.

Faculty members pick up the service’s fliers left around campus, find advertisements written on chalkboards and occasionally chase away people promising students study help on an upcoming test, professors said.

“This could be a real service, if they really offered tutoring,” Flamm said. “But they don’t.”

A teaching assistant tackled a student trying to flee with a test in another class, Duran said. Accounting professor Roberta Allen remembers a student bolting out of a large lecture hall class a few years ago with a copy of her exam.

“I chased him pretty far, but I couldn’t catch him,” she said, laughing. “He was a lot faster than me.”

Selling the exams without the permission of the test author is a violation of copyright law, but that’s a hard violation to prosecute, Duran said. The tests aren’t considered very valuable, so a theft charge is a misdemeanor offense.

Students who are stealing the tests are hard to track down for officials who might press student code of conduct violations, she said.

“So it’s been a very difficult problem to solve, because it’s an ethical issue, an integrity issue, more than it is a legal issue,” Duran said.

And faculty and administrators aren’t sure what to make of students who use the service. Students are cheating if they know the questions they study are on the next day’s test, Allen said.

But Duran, who also chairs the university’s committee on academic integrity, hesitated to say using the service was cheating.

“We don’t have a good idea of how widespread its use is,” Duran said. “I don’t know if we can officially call it cheating. We don’t like it and it’s not fair.”

To Ahmed, it’s just business. Other groups provide the same services – his are just better advertised, he said. Some students can afford to skip class and use his study guides, and that probably makes other students a little green, he said.

“You could see how somebody could be jealous or upset or angry,” Ahmed said. “I know when I was in college, I couldn’t afford a $50 test packet.”