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Mom Gets Three Weeks in Test Scandal, Accused of Faking Race

The eighth parent, Peter Jan Sartorio, was sentenced Friday to a year of probation, after terms ranging up to five months.

Mom Gets Three Weeks in Test Scandal, Accused of Faking Race
A GCSE student fills in his personal details on an exam answer book at Maidstone Grammar School, in Kent, U.K. (Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News)  

(Bloomberg) -- A California woman who admitted paying $15,000 to rig her son’s college entrance exam scores got three weeks in prison after a federal judge said she compounded her crime by falsifying the boy’s ethnicity on his applications and by an earlier act of deception.

“I do find the offense here slightly more troubling” than that of Felicity Huffman, the “Desperate Housewives” star sentenced last month to two weeks behind bars, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said in court in Boston on Wednesday.

Talwani was meting out the latest punishment in the U.S. college admissions scandal, this time to Marjorie Klapper, a 51-year-old jeweler from Menlo Park. Like Klapper, Huffman paid $15,000 to fix her child’s scores.

But Talwani called Klapper out for her “willingness to distort the application” and for what the government says was an earlier scheme on behalf of her older son.

“I would like to apologize first to my son for all of his struggles,” Klapper said before her sentence was pronounced. “I’m the last person who wanted him to experience more pain.”

Klapper spoke of the families of other children who need special accommodations for tests and said she hoped her crime wouldn’t cause them to face tougher questioning when they sought extra time for their own kids.

“I feel awful if I set them back,” she said.

Klapper is the ninth parent sentenced of 15 who pleaded guilty to a mail-fraud conspiracy charge for paying Rick Singer, the scheme’s mastermind, to get their children into college, sometimes using a corrupt proctor as an accomplice. The eighth parent, Peter Jan Sartorio, was sentenced Friday to a year of probation, after terms ranging from two weeks to five months. Klapper had argued her sentence should lie somewhere on the spectrum from Sartorio’s to Huffman’s.

In papers filed before her sentencing, Klapper’s lawyers presented an analysis of U.S. Sentencing Commission data they said called for leniency. From 2006 to 2018, they said, almost 90% of mail-fraud defendants like Klapper -- those who pleaded guilty and had no criminal record -- got at most one day in jail.

The defense asked Talwani to have mercy on Klapper, citing her son’s learning disability and the emotional turmoil of her sister’s death in 2017 while she was working to get the boy into college.

Prosecutors said that Klapper had first hired Singer to help the older son with his tests and that he got an SAT score of 2140 out of 2400. That exam didn’t involve Singer’s accomplice, they said, but the score was canceled after the boy was accused of cheating, partly on the basis of “an extremely unusual” discrepancy with the score he got on his preliminary SAT. The government said Klapper and Singer had sought to explain the strong performance by faking an invoice that showed more than 170 hours of private tutoring.

Klapper’s defense attorney Jonathan McDougall didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the earlier events.

In delivering Klapper’s sentence, Talwani cited general deterrence.

“The issue is the cover-up,” she told McDougall at one point. “The issue is the false statements to the test center to say there was more tutoring that happened than did happen.”

Besides her jail term, Klapper was sentenced to 250 hours of community service and a fine of $9,500. Prosecutors said she deserved four months in prison and a $20,000 fine.

In addition to paying to fix her younger son’s ACT scores, they said, she falsely claimed on the boy’s college applications that he was of African-American and Hispanic descent and that neither she nor her husband had attended college. Klapper said it was Singer and his staff, using the application passwords, who entered the false information.

“Ms. Klapper did not want to level the playing field,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Justin O’Connell told Talwani. “She wanted to rig the entire game.”

When the boy got a 30 out of 36 on the ACT, a strong score, Klapper emailed Singer a copy of the score report, according to prosecutors, with whom Singer came to cooperate.

“Omg,” she told Singer, according to the government. “I guess he’s not testing again.”

“Yep,” Singerreplied, “he is brilliant.”

The case is U.S. v. Abbott, 19-cr-10117, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).

To contact the reporters on this story: Janelle Lawrence in Boston at jlawrence62@bloomberg.net;Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey, Steve Stroth

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