2 Principal Turns a Cheating Scandal into a Sting Operation: The 2012 Stuyvesant High School Cheating Incident

Before the incident

Stuyvesant High School is a prestigious school in Lower Manhattan, an upper-class region of New York City. On June 16th, 2012, Stuyvesant Principal Stanley Teitel received an email from Student G, an unidentified female student. Student G mentioned in her email that many students planned to cheat on the upcoming Regents Exam, a state-wide standardized test in New York. She provided Mr. Teitel with a detailed description of the students’ plans to cheat, including what would happen during the exam and who would be involved. Student G stated that Student A “received the answers to the physics, US history, and English regents from about four people through messaging. [Student A] then sent out the answers to 50+ people via a mass text” (p.50).

Mr. Teitel held an emergency cabinet meeting with the school’s assistant principals the morning before the exam to orchestrate a plan to catch Student A. The plan was to send a strong proctor to the Spanish exam to watch Student A predominantly. If the student were cheating, he would be caught, and there would be enough evidence of the premeditated mass cheating to proceed with disciplinary action against all participating parties.

During the meeting, Mr. Teitel introduced his plan for a “sting operation”. The plan was to create a scenario in which Student A thought he was in a position where he could successfully cheat using his electronic device. Student A was unaware that Mr. Teitel hired a proctor to monitor the exam and catch the student being academically dishonest. After the meeting, Jennifer Suri, the assistant principal of the Social Studies department, asked Daniel Tillman, a social studies teacher, to proctor Student A’s exams.

The day of the exam

On June 18th, 2012, Mr. Tillman went to the school to act as a proctor to supervise the Spanish Regents Exam. During the exam, at approximately 1:50 pm, Mr. Tillman noticed Student A “remove a cell phone from his pocket, place it on his lap, and [begin] to type. He then placed it back into his pocket” (p. 42). Mr. Tillman then observed Student A take out his phone and take a picture of the test. Shortly after Student A took the picture, Mr. Tillman contacted Mr. Teitel and informed him that Student A was using his phone during the exam. Upon Mr. Teitel’s arrival, he immediately asked Student A if he had a phone on him and instructed him to give it to him. Student A countered by asking him why, to which Mr. Teitel responded, “Because I am the principal.” This altercation resulted in Student A surrendering his phone, and both exited the examination room and proceeded to the principal’s office.

After Student A was removed from the examination room, he was taken to Mr. Teitel’s office, and shortly after, Randy Damesek, the Assistant Principal of Organization and Testing Coordinator, arrived. Upon her arrival, she informed Student A that he could finish writing his exam. While Student A was completing the exam, Mr. Teitel and Ms. Damesek attempted to retrieve evidence of Student A’s cheating by going through his phone. They found that “he had used his phone to disseminate information to classmates during multiple exams” (p. 5). Once Student A completed the exam, his father was called to retrieve him from the school. While Ms. Damesek continued to retrieve information from Student A’s phone, Mr. Teitel informed the father about what had happened.

Mr. Teitel noted they were considering transferring Student A out of the school through a transportation or safety transfer. The transportation transfer would mean that the student would move to another school, and a safety transfer would imply that the student would have to move schools due to safety-related issues. However, Student A had no safety concerns and was unwilling to be transferred to a different school, so he and his father did not approve of either option suggested by Mr. Teitel. Mr. Teitel asked if they could keep the phone to investigate further. Student A and his father agreed; however, after they left the school, the data from his phone was promptly erased.

After the exam

The following day, Student A and his father returned to the school and ran into Ms. Damesek, who told them that Student A would have to “leave the school”  (p. 5). Shortly after, Student A’s guidance counsellor provided the transportation transfer paperwork to the Assistant Principal and Pupil Personnel Services, Eleanor Archie. Ms. Archie refused to sign the paperwork, as student A had not relocated or switched residences, nor experienced any safety-related issues at school.

A second meeting was held on Friday, June 22nd, 2012. During this meeting, Mr. Teitel confirmed with the staff that Student A had initiated the cheating, noting that he had sent the answers of the exam to 70 other students. Of the 70 students, 50 responded or otherwise participated in the cheating. During the meeting, Mr. Teitel did not address how the students were directly involved or how to deal with the situation. The other faculty members suggested that an appropriate form of punishment for the students who also participated should be to revoke various privileges such as their lunch privileges, extracurricular activities, and leadership roles. During this meeting, Mr. Teitel informed the staff that he had sent out a letter to the parents of the involved students, alerting them about the course of action yet to be taken. Eventually, fifty-four students engaged in the cheating “were suspended due to their involvement in, or knowledge of, student cheating during the June 2012 Regents exam” (p. 41).

Discussion Questions

1. Do you think cheating is harder to commit in high school or postsecondary? If so, what experience have you heard of or had that resonates with you?
2. What aspects of the principal’s investigation would you change? For example, was it the right decision to call in a proctor to watch the student commit the act? Why or why not?
3. Why do you think the principal conducted this investigation instead of just contacting the student after receiving the email?
4. Mr. Teitel and Ms. Damasek eventually lost their jobs due to their handling of this incident and were criticized for being slow to investigate and to report the incident to the school board. Do you agree with this assessment and/or punishment?
5.  Student A was briefly suspended from Stuyvesant and finished his high school education at another school. Upon graduation, he found employment with a test preparation agency. Would you recommend that students take test prep classes with him? Why or why not?

References

In lieu of a reference section, please note that all information and quotes in this case come from the report “An Investigation into Cheating and Testing Improprieties at Stuyvesant High School during June 2012” by Dennis Boyles, Kara Hughes, Robert Small, and other anonymous authors, for the New York City Department of Education, published by the Wall Street Journal and accessed at https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nystuy083013.pdf. Students’ names are anonymized as in the original report, but Student A’s identity was revealed in media reporting in 2012 and 2013.