CHEATERS SENTENCED FOR LAW EXAM SCAM.

Byline: Donna Huffaker Staff Writer

GLENDALE - Describing the crime as an insult to everyone who studies legitimately, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Wednesday sentenced two Glendale men to a year of home detention for their intricate cheating scheme on the Law School Admissions Test.

Judge Larry Paul Fidler disagreed with the prosecutor's recommendation of state prison for one of the defendants and said he believes both men are one-time offenders who are going to have this felony on their records for the rest of their lives - lives that will never be lived as attorneys.

Still, Glendale residents Danny Khatchaturian, 24, and Dikran Iskendarian, 23, and a third defendant must pay nearly $97,000 in restitution to the Law School Admissions Council.

Khatchaturian and Iskendarian pleaded no contest in November to conspiracy, theft and robbery in the Feb. 8, 1997, incident.

In an elaborate scheme that involved alphanumeric pagers and exploiting time zone differences, Khatchaturian and Iskendarian took the law school admissions exam in Hawaii three hours after a third defendant, Ashot Melikyan of Glendale, stole a test booklet from the University of Southern California Testing Center, prosecutors said.

While the 24-year-old Melikyan was in the testing room at USC, he grabbed the booklet from a proctor who chased Melikyan until Melikyan threatened him with a knife.

Melikyan, who pleaded guilty in October to second-degree robbery, registered for the test by using a fake ID. Khatchaturian, who attended USC, and Iskendarian, who attended Woodbury University in Burbank, paid Melikyan $600 to steal the LSAT booklet so they could have the correct answers transmitted via pager while they took the exam in Hawaii.

Khatchaturian and Iskendarian flew together to the University of Hawaii- Manoa Testing Center, where a test proctor noticed the men paying more attention to their pagers than to the exam.

Both Khatchaturian and Iskendarian scored in the 99th percentile - a rare feat scored typically by students who go on to attend Harvard, Yale and Stanford universities, said Deputy District Attorney Loni Petersen. When both men took the test again without cheating, their scores plummeted to the 40th percentile.

On Wednesday, Khatchaturian lowered his head during testimony and the prosecutor's arguments.

``The level of criminality should not be minimized,'' Petersen said. ``This was not a stupid mistake or a moment of folly.''

Petersen compared the defendants' criminal sophistication to that of stealing corporate secrets or robbing a bank.

A statistician who testified Wednesday likened the defendants' acts to not just hacking into someone's computer but inserting a virus into a computer.

Because the admissions council was unable to reuse the test, it incurred a loss of $600,000 - the value of an entire test, council representative James Vaseleck testified. From that figure, Fidler used $40,000 - the value of one part of the exam - and added court fines to derive the $96,719 amount the three defendants must pay collectively.

Saying his client lost his judgment while under extreme pressure to excel, Armand Arabian told the court Khatchaturian was a student with a 3.7 grade point average who displayed the ``fragility of humanity.'' Outside court, Arabian said Fidler's sentence was just.