Same reason DRM-data rights management or DLP-data loss protection technologies are rather pointless against determined attackers. Anything that is permitted to be viewed can be copied.
Thus, if the test is worth taking for a student (because they want to go to college), it's probably worth cheating on. Students outside the top 0.1% can appear better than their peers to improve their odds of getting into better universities, and students in the top 0.1% tend to be there due to intense extrinsic pressure, which may drive them to cheat to increase their certainty of acing it.
For a competent student, it's not hard to get an acceptable grade. For every student, it's difficult to achieve an exceptional grade.
Admittedly, it wouldn't help that much if you are Asian and from a wealthy area, but if you cheated then you could spend time that you would have spent studying for the SAT instead doing something else that you could put on your application.
apparent•1w ago
I assume that "plug-in" means peripheral? Seems very difficult to catch all of these people, since a proctor won't be able to inspect the device and tell whether it is a regular mouse or something trickier.
Virtual machines seem like a game of cat and mouse, and one which the SAT is likely to lose.