Joye Brown: In cheating, no winners

It's sad to think that high school students could have such low regard for themselves and their abilities that they would pay someone else to take their college entrance exams.

And, yes, it is a sad commentary that the pressure to get into college is so high that so much seems to depend on a test that experts say is valuable in predicting only how a student may perform during freshman year.

But most kids don't cheat on their SATs. They take the tests -- one, two, even three times -- before riding their score to wherever it may take them.

Last week, 11 current and former students of North Shore high schools were arrested. They face criminal charges in connection with cheating on college admission tests. Two more students are expected to surrender Monday, bringing to 20 the number of current and former students implicated in the probe. Four of the suspects allegedly were paid to impersonate other students and take the test for them, according to Kathleen Rice, Nassau County's district attorney.

It boggles the mind to consider that one cheater may have knocked an honest student out of line at a preferred college. Now multiply that by the growing number of students charged, and every college attracted by their allegedly false scores.

It's hard not to wonder how the accused cheaters would have performed in college, had authorities not intervened. Would they have made it? Failed? Hired other students to do their work? Would they have grown emotionally and, like most college students, become more mature?

Or did a dumb decision to look smart by cheating pull them from that path, long before the scandal made the news?

And what of the young adults who, prosecutors allege, willingly pocketed thousands of dollars to relive an experience that, even now, most of us wouldn't take a million bucks to redo?

It was a dumb way for smart kids to make a fast buck.

Did any one of them regret the deception before Rice caught up with them? Would they regret it had they remained scot-free? Even in the current cases, it remains to be seen whether adults had any role in the growing SAT cheating scandal in some of the highest-achieving districts on Long Island by subsidizing or encouraging the deception.

How many others are out there, even now, sweating it out? And surely this can't be new -- how many generations of other students managed the same deception?

SAT officials say they are looking for ways to toughen up the way students are identified when they walk in for tests.

Great. Just one more thing to make nervous, honest kids more nervous.

As for those students who paid, because they are likely to be treated as youthful offenders facing misdemeanor charges, they have some hope of picking up and starting again.

The older suspects, well, they are entitled to the presumption of innocence on the harsher criminal charges; still, they'll have a tougher time of it because their names, thanks to the Internet, are forever linked to the scandal.

Even as things unfold, one lesson seems clear. Should the allegations prove true, the cheating suspects, instead of getting ahead, will have ended up only cheating themselves.