Close to 100 students at the city’s premier public high school received text messages with answers to this month’s Regents exams, students and teachers said yesterday.
Students said the alleged ringleader at Stuyvesant HS in Battery Park City — 16-year-old junior Nayeem Ahsan — was someone who regularly sent out photographs of test questions and answers to his classmates.
He also got answers sent in return, they said.
“This kid prided himself on doing this sort of thing. He’s been doing it for a long time,” said Catalina Piccato, a 16-year-old junior. “He’s been lamenting being caught on Facebook.”
Asked about rumors that Ahsan’s motivation might have been money, Piccato and other students dismissed it.
“There normally isn’t money involved when it comes to cheating,” she said.
Ahsan — busted with a cellphone full of answers to three tests while taking the June 18 Spanish Regents exam — had also distributed answers to the recent Physics Regents exam, according to classmates.
“He compiled an answer key. He sent out those answers to some 90-odd students,” said junior Leopold Spohngellert. “Somehow, the administration got a hold of this.”
Principal Stanley Teitel, who went through Ahsan’s text messages after catching him using a cellphone during last week’s exam, told parents of dozens of students that their kids “had engaged in text messaging involving the various June 2012 Regents with students taking the exam.”
He said their kids’ social privileges would be revoked in the coming school year — including being barred from school clubs and sports teams, and the senior perk of going off-campus for lunch.
Ahsan, by contrast, is being forced to transfer to another school this summer.
“As principal, I find this very disturbing,” Teitel wrote in a letter to those parents last week. “I find this breach of integrity very serious and hope you will talk with your child about the need to remain honest and preserve their academic goals at Stuyvesant and beyond.”
Yet some teachers complained that students aren’t disciplined consistently enough when it comes to cheating or having their cellphones in class.
“Cheating is a problem at Stuyvesant. On several occasions I have caught students cheating while I was proctoring an exam,” said Spanish teacher Milton Diaz.
“There is a lack of consistency in disciplinary measures used to address this problem,” he added.
State officials wouldn’t say whether the cheating was reported to them, as required, and the city Department of Education said it didn’t learn of the allegations until this week.
The DOE’s Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation is looking into the incidents.
Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli and Christa Nianiatus