ABSTRACT
As a result of the public’s seemingly insatiable hunger for scandal, it is difficult to pick up a national newspaper or watch a national news program in which we are not learning about athletes taking performance enhancing drugs, teams spying on other teams’ practices or trying to steal their signals, individuals falsifying tax documents to avoid paying taxes, stock brokers engaged in insider trading, investment firms conducting Ponzi schemes, seemingly happily married folk cheating on their partners, or, as is the focus in the Handbook, examinees, educators, or entrepreneurs cheating or helping others to cheat on standardized examinations. In light of the popular media’s penchant for sensationalizing stories, it is easy to become desensitized to test fraud. However, cheating on tests is very real, and the impact it is having on test score interpretations, the public’s confidence in the testing industry, and our economy ought not to be underestimated. In this chapter, we discuss the magnitude of the security problem in all areas of testing, and attempt to set the stage for the chapters that follow.
