Amid the publicity surrounding the start of Larry Adler’s sentence on perjury charges — he’ll finish his reduced 10-day jail term this week — it is easy to forget how close the former Winston Churchill High School student came to successfully cheating on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

Adler was not foiled by a test administrator noticing that the person taking the test was not the person pictured on Adler’s driver’s license. Nor was he done in by the Educational Testing Service’s analysis of his test scores for irregularities. Instead, Adler was thwarted by the one factor he should have had …