Niki Williams admissions, Former exam administrator pleads guilty in college scam

 Niki Williams admissions, Former exam administrator pleads guilty in college scam.

A former Houston college admissions test administrator pleaded guilty Friday to taking bribes in a cheating scheme designed to inflate the scores used to determine whether prospective students got into universities, federal prosecutors said.

The guilty plea of Niki Williams is part of a massive college admissions cheating case that exposed how wealthy parents would pay to have their children's test scores increased, or to have them falsely admitted as student-athletes. The investigation announced last year was called "Operation Varsity Blues."

Williams, 46, a former employee of the Houston Independent School District, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud and honest services wire fraud and mail fraud, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts said in a statement.

Williams worked at a high school and took bribes in the scheme, prosecutors said.

She allowed a man, Mark Riddell, to secretly take SAT and ACT tests in the place of children of parents who were clients of the scheme's mastermind, William "Rick" Singer, or to replace those students' answers with Riddell's corrected answers, prosecutors said. Williams would then submit the tests to the ACT or the College Board.

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