I think for those who claim that only a small minority of the test takers in Korea/China cheat with this scheme miss the point entirely about the overall impact of this on admissions to elite colleges. Since internationals do not take APs, and at least in China, their GPAs are completely fabricated, the only way to determine who gets in or not is by looking at the SAT scores. Remember in US there are only about 0.5% of the SAT test takers score 2300+, and let’s say about 1% of the test takers in Korea and China cheat and resulted in scores of 2300+ (it’s reasonable to assume that outcome otherwise why cheat?), then one’d expect that about 2/3 of the Ivy league internationals from Korea/China probably gained entry with false credentials. The point of this is that a small/tiny minority can and will have an enormous impact on admissions to elite colleges.
Given that non-resident/internationals represent roughly 20% of the last year’s incoming class at Columbia, and close to 800 for all SAT sections at the “upper 25% SAT range” for the top 5 ranked schools on USNW, the colleges will not and cannot afford to lose this important source of tuition revenue and ranking booster, cheating or not.