Twenty-one (21) life insurance agents in Surrey are currently under investigation by the Insurance Council of British Columbia (ICBC) for allegedly colluding to cheat on their own licensing exams.
ICBC executive director Gerald Matier told CBC that an audit of exams written over the past year found a highly dubious distribution of multiple-choice exams with near-identical right and wrong answers. The set of suspiciously similar answers were written between October 2016 and June 2017.
The council’s investigation into the matter revealed that those exams were all written by agents affiliated with a particular Surrey branch of World Financial Group. Matier declined to reveal which branch was involved.
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“So many people coming from the same location having pretty well the exact same answers — particularly on the ones that were wrong — that’s what kind of makes it look very unusual,” he said.
“We’ve never encountered it before.... We’ve caught the odd person cheating, but we’ve never found it at this level where there appears to be collusion involving more than one person.”
Matier believes that the cheating, while a low-tech effort, was coordinated.
ICBC suspects that one person took the exams first, memorized what he/she had answered, then gave the sequence to the other alleged cheaters.
There are four versions of the licensing exams, which means one or more people were involved in the scheme.
The cheating scheme, however, was not foolproof. Some of the test-takers used the wrong answer sequences on some sections of their exams, Matier noted.
The agents accused of cheating are entitled to hearings to prove that they did not cheat – those who cannot prove their innocence will lose their licenses.
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