The Graduate Management Admission Council recently canceled the GMAT scores of 130 test-takers. And why? Well, because they cheated…in one of the biggest GMAT cheating scandals in history! So how did these people try to scheme their way to better GMAT scores? By not taking the test themselves, of course. Instead, a ringleader of the scheme in India organized the online test-taking for the students. Because that always goes according to plan, right? Wrong!

As John A. Byrne reports for Poets & Quants in a piece entitled “A Major GMAT Cheating Scandal Raises More Concerns About The Test,” “According to the police, candidates paid between $4,000 to $20,000 to get a member of the online cheating syndicate to take the test for them. In some cases, they were able to achieve scores as high as 780, a result that would put the candidate into the top 1% of GMAT test-takers in the world. It is the biggest cheating scandal gone public since 2012 when another scam artist was indicted, along with four other men and a woman, who had taken the GMAT on behalf of nearly 600 candidates from January of 2001 to July of 2003.”

With the future of standardized testing in peril at universities across the land, this sort of scandal doesn’t exactly serve the testing companies. This particular scam apparently existed for about two years. So how come it took the Graduate Management Admission Council so long to figure it out and zero in on the culprits?