Identical twin sisters were accused of cheating on a test. A jury awarded them $1.5 million.

Identical twin sisters accused of cheating on their year-end medical school exams have won a defamation case against the Medical University of South Carolina.

The twins, Kayla and Kellie Bingham, were accused of "academic dishonesty" in May 2016 after test proctors reviewed the results of an exam on which their performance was deemed to be remarkably similar. The sisters' identical answers to 296 of 307 questions, including 54 wrong answers, raised alarm bells among university officials, who launched an investigation into the twins' performance.

A school "honor council" alleged the pair "were signaling one another and passing notes," court documents show, and ultimately ruled they had cheated on the exam.

"It was an eight-hour exam during which we exhibited normal test-taking behavior," Kayla Bingham told CBS MoneyWatch.

The Binghams successfully appealed the decision and filed a lawsuit against the university, arguing that for years they had behaved and performed similarly academically and in athletics. After a four-day trial in November, a South Carolina jury decided the school had defamed the sisters and awarded them a total of $1.5 million in damages.

Kayla (left) and Kellie Bingham now work for the same South Carolina law firm. Rodney Choice

The Binghams' legal case hinged on the theory that it is common for identical twins to perform similarly on tests given their genetic profiles. Nancy Segal, who runs California State University, Fullerton's Twin Studies Center and who testified in the case, said numerous studies show that identical twins often perform similarly on a range of cognitive tests.

"There is a wealth of psychological research that shows that identical twins do perform very similarly on tests of intelligence, information processing and speed of response, and I was not at all surprised they turned in very similar exams," Segal, who is a psychologist, told CBS MoneyWatch.

"When identical twins perform very differently it catches our attention," she added. "When they perform alike, it's very consistent with the literature. I would have been surprised if they hadn't scored alike."

In their suit, the Binghams said the cheating allegations led to their experiencing psychological distress, including panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"It was a very hostile environment. People we had known, sat next to and studied with for two years would not speak to us," Kellie Bingham told CBS MoneyWatch. "They knew our work ethic and study habits but refused to hear our side of the story. People we trusted completely turned their backs on us."

The university's accusation and the events that ensued also interfered with the Binghams' plans to become doctors. The two now work as government affairs advisers at the same South Carolina law firm.

"We came to understand that once word gets out, even if it's not accurate, it damages your reputation as a person. So we completely switched tracks," Kayla said, adding that she "wanted to fight back because I had been wronged."

lennybriscoforthewin on December 11st, 2022 at 04:33 UTC »

Why didn’t the proctor separate them? That’s elementary testing management.

anders987 on December 11st, 2022 at 01:01 UTC »

This is ridiculous. I'm an identical twin, and my brother and I have never tested close enough to be accused of cheating. I recently read about this case elsewhere, and I think that article/blog post paints a much different picture. Here's some extracts, emphasis mine:

The twins, Kayla and Kellie Bingham, have spent the last six years in a defamation suit against the Medical University of South Carolina, who claimed that exam invigilators noticed the twins—who were sitting near to each other as they completed the important medical exam—seemed to be moving in peculiar ways that implied they were communicating with each other.

The university also found that the twins’ scores on the exam were nearly identical: of 307 questions, they gave the same answer 296 times, including 54 times where they gave the same wrong answer. They argued that the twins answered the questions—which were done by computer—at a near-identical pace throughout the exam. A examinations company concluded that the probability the twins took the test independently was one in 100 undecillions (a undecillion is a 1 with 36 zeros after it; 1036).

For this reason, Segal argued that the report by the examinations company—called Caveon—was “completely irrelevant”. Here’s part of her exchange with the university’s lawyer:

LAWYER: …and what should Caveon had done that they didn't do?

SEGAL: Well, they should have… factored in some sort of measure of genetic relatedness. I'm not sure how you do that statistically. But given the research on identical twins, both raised apart and together, in terms of similarities in test scores, this was a grievous omission. I mean, when I show these to colleagues, they hardly believe it.

L: Okay. But do you have any specific proposal for what they should have done to account for the fact that they were twins?

S: Well, there should have been some statistical correction there. There should have been a statistical correction. … Now, is there such -- do I know a statistical correction? No, I'm not a statistician.

Well, the twins’ legal team went ahead and made such a correction. They took the Caveon number—1 in 1038—and corrected it for the similarity of the twins. If, they argued, twins are twice as similar as the average person, the number should be divided by two, giving 1 in 1019. Still pretty big.

But if the twins are ten times more similar than the average person, you’d do 1038 divided by 10, which is of course 1 in 103.8, which translates as 1 in 6309. That seems much more likely to occur by random chance! Case closed!

There are two problems with this. First, the “ten times” figure is just pulled from thin air - but how similar twins are compared to the average person is at least a debate we could have. The second, much bigger problem is that the calculation is complete, utter nonsense. That’s not how you divide numbers - you don’t divide the exponent, but the number itself! So, 1038 divided by 10 is not 103.8 - it’s 1037 - still an unbelievably enormous number.

The university also put forward some counter-arguments to the idea that the performance would be expected to be extremely similar:

The twins’ similarity on other exams across the year varied dramatically - sometimes it was as low as 60% and sometimes as high as 96% - so it wasn’t always near-identical;

The specific pattern of strengths and weaknesses differed between the twins: Kayla did better in exams on the nervous system, for example, whereas Kellie was much better at exams on the endocrine and renal systems. Again, not what you’d expect if they were fundamentally the same person. There was an exception to this pattern, and it was the exam in question.

QuestionableAI on December 10th, 2022 at 21:19 UTC »

This is a very interesting case. The women were maligned by the University and they won their suit against outrageous and stupid claims. Good for them, although it is very likely that the university has not actually learned anything,

Edited for grammar ... thanks ruleseventysix