Hi, guys

Below is a link to the latest BusinessWeek article on the scoretop lawsuit, going into more detail about who should worry and who should not. Basically, as I said in an earlier post, they'll only be going after people they can prove knew the questions were actually live or written off of live questions. If you didn't indicate that you knew this through the language in your posts, it's unlikely that they will have sufficient proof.

For those of you who really didn't know what was going on and were just using scoretop as a study community, you should be totally fine. You won't have any posts in which you discussed what was going on because you really didn't know. Take a deep breath; it's okay.

In future, make sure that you check the standards of the communities you do use. If the community doesn't have a "banned source" list and doesn't explicitly take steps to keep the posts "clean," then don't even visit that site ever again. I recommend Beat The GMAT - they're a great community and they work hard to keep things legal.

If you did knowingly view / use the info... I guess I don't have to say "don't do anything like that ever again," right? You already know that. Still. Don't do it. Earn things on your own merits. You'll be much more satisfied with yourself and your life if you do.

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2008/bs20080627_391632.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_news+%2B+analysis

Neeless to say, this news is disturbing my preparation.
I was a VIP member. It was one of the numerous things/books, incuding all MGMAT and Kaplan books, I am using to prepare.
I did not see any live question but visited many questions discussed and replied to the discussion as well. Does it make me a culprit? I guess not.

GMAC should fix itself going forward and not try to bully and jeaopardize thousands of people's career.

GMAT should be fair to all the students and cancel all their scores, but GMAT should allow them all to retake the test. It its absolutely unfair if the scores are just cancelled and the students are never allowed to retake it! It will leave a vast number of students with no future and will have to completely restart their education in another field. In reality how exactly are they going to figure out which students did post questions and which just used the site for help? Future outcomes for these students based on assumptions is not the road GMAT should take.

Guys - they can't cancel scores and ban someone forever without MAJOR lawsuits unless they really do have evidence that someone cheated. They're only going to do it if they really can produce evidence that would hold up in a court of law. If you did not cheat, then that evidence doesn't exist, and you have nothing to worry about.

Part of what they're saying is just to make a lot of headlines to get the word out so that people aren't even a little bit tempted to cheat in the future.

I was a scoretop vip member, and posted about 800 posts to discussion forums and some of them are related to vip questions. I got the GMAT last month and scored 700+. My happiness didn't last long. I got a mail a notification mail from GMAC that says because I was a vip member in scoretop I'm under investigation. The mail said that my scores may be cancelled. Some of my friends who had vip membership hasn't taken THE e-mail thAT GMAC sent to me. Does this mean that ı'm under great risk. Or GMAC hasn't send any mails to the others because they are not aware of them yet. I'm under great stress. If I knew the fact about vip questions I would never ever enter the scoretop. I'm too sorry I've lost 2 kgs in 5 days. I can't sleep and my work performance is too low. My life is like a ruin.

I'm very sorry that I overlooked this post and haven't responded for so long - I forgot this post was "stuck" at the top of the thread.

I don't know why you received an email and your friends didn't. The bigger issue is whether you actually knew that people were discussing live questions. If you were aware of this, and your posts indicated you were aware of this, then you are probably at risk. If you were not aware of this, then your posts presumably won't indicate that you were aware (since you weren't). I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think they can cancel your score just because you were a member. I think they have to show intent to cheat.

Did the notification from GMAC give you any kind of contact info to ask questions, etc? You could contact them and offer to cooperate - explain what you did below, that if you'd known, you wouldn't have gone anywhere near the site at all, etc. Also explain how much stress you're under and that you want to do what you can to resolve the issue because of the extreme stress this is causing you. Just offering to cooperate should help a little - after all, guilty people don't usually offer to cooperate.