New OC Reality TV - Celebrity Cheating - Redux

Apparently Orange County Superior Court Judge Jamoa Moberly did not read the Celebrity Cheating Reality TV script, as she ruled against Trabuco HS Students yesterday and ordered that "testing should go forward. It's in the best interest of everyone."

The lawsuit with a price tag of roughly $15,000, targeted the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) over the ETS' decision to invalidate 690 AP exams at Trabuco Hills High School and accused the company of not adequately investigating allegations of cheating and improper proctoring on the May exams.

Bill Mitchell, Chris Battersby Assemblyman and Todd Spitzer, R-Orange composed the legal team recruited to fight ETS' decision

Marc B. Victor, with a law degree from Stanford, while working for a high-tech firm that was suing IBM for monopoly, was asked to help the legal team arrive at a reasonable settlement figure. What amount should the firm be advised to settle for, and how could the company feel confident that the figure represented a good deal? Using his legal training and knowledge of decision analysis, Victor helped the firm and its outside counsel develop a decision model - a novel approach that provided a rigorous quantitative assessment of the lawsuit's value

Wondering if Victor's algorithm could have been used by the students to figure probability of success in fighting ETS taking into account cheating trends - for example:

1. MIT admissions dean resigns over fake resume
reads a recent USATODAY.COM headline

2. In the 8-15-2006 issue of the Wall Street Journal there is an article with the following headlines: "Student Plagiarism Stirs Controversy at Ohio University", and goes on to detail how certain professors in preparing their thesis, used someone else's work, without properly acknowledging the source! Of course, penalties are being doled out in this matter! Seems like certain degrees already conferred will be revoked

3. Consider that according to Stephen Davis, a psychology professor at Emporia State University in Kansas, surveys of college students in the 1940s showed that 20 percent of them admitted to having cheated in high school,


4. According to a 1998 survey by the Josepheson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, 70 percent of high-school students (and 54 percent of middleschool students) said they'd cheated on an exam.