A couple grand can get you magically high SAT scores from a student at one of our nation’s top academic high schools:

A college student from New York was paid between $1,500 and $2,500 to stand in for at least a half dozen students attending a prestigious Long Island high school and take the SAT exam for them, a prosecutor said Tuesday in announcing criminal charges in the case. . . .

Earlier this year, Great Neck North faculty members heard rumors that students had paid a third party to take the SAT for them. . . . Administrators then identified six students who “had large discrepancies between their academic performance records and their SAT scores,” the prosecutor said.

The students had registered to take the tests at a different school where they would not be recognized. Eshaghoff then went to the schools and showed a photo ID with his picture, but another student’s name on it, Rice said. At least once, Eshaghoff flew home from college primarily to impersonate two students and took the SAT twice in one weekend. . . .

The school is rated as one of the nation’s top academic high schools. Alumni include David Baltimore, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist; filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola; and Olympic figure skating champion Sarah Hughes.