(Bloomberg) -- The first couple to be sentenced in the U.S. college admissions scandal are set to face a federal judge Tuesday afternoon, arguing their family was in turmoil when they fell prey to a con man who fixed their daughter’s entrance-exam scores for $125,000.

Gregory Abbott, founder and former chairman of International Dispensing Corp., and his wife, Marcia, a former magazine editor, have asked U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston to spare them prison and sentence them instead to a period of probation.

“To all those who struggle every day to put food on the table and get their kids access to college, I apologize,” Gregory Abbott, 69, wrote to Talwani in a pre-sentencing filing.

He said his acts, spurred by the pressures of a “crumbling family,” were “wrong and stupid” and that he feels “genuine remorse -- not because I was caught, but because taking this shortcut diminished me in my own eyes.”

He stepped down from the company after pleading guilty.

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The couple say they didn’t set out to cheat but made a “terrible mistake” after trying to help their daughter through an illness even as their marriage was falling apart. The girl had Lyme disease, costing her a part-time position as a singer with the Metropolitan Opera, forcing her to leave high school and take courses online, and compromising her performance on standardized tests, they say.

The couple say the con man, Rick Singer, held himself out as the founder of the online school that was providing her coursework.

“The Abbotts make no excuses for what happened next,” their lawyers wrote to Talwani. “Greg and Marcia each knew then that they should walk away. Neither did.”

The Abbotts aren’t celebrities “who ride the highs and lows of public approval, but private people whose fifteen minutes of fame is a spotlight on the most difficult chapter in their lives,” their attorneys argued. For that reason, they say, there’s no need for a harsher sentence to “afford adequate deterrence” or “protect the public from further crimes of the defendant.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Rosen has argued in court filings that the Abbotts deserve eight months in prison each. Of the 11 defendants who have pleaded guilty and are facing Talwani for sentencing, only they engaged twice in the score-boosting fraud, he said.

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Rosen said it was the Abbotts who “exploited” the situation to get their daughter extended time to take the ACT entrance exam so she could take the tests from home. Singer later arranged for her answers to be rigged to a near-perfect score of 35 out of 36, he said. It cost them $50,000.

A few months later, after she took the SAT II subject tests on her own and got about a 600 out of 800, prosecutors said, the couple paid Singer $75,000 more to have her retested at a center he controlled. Ultimately, she received a perfect score on the math test and a 710 on the literature exam, according to the U.S., submitting the fraudulent scores in her college applications. It’s unclear if the girl was admitted to a college.

The couple was “fully complicit” in the scam, Rosen said, adding, “Neither of the Abbotts exhibited second thoughts or regret” even as they “actively pursued it over nearly eight months.” Marcia Abbott threatened to sue the College Board when it failed to promptly grade and release her daughter’s test scores, he said.

Imprisonment will have “serious collateral consequences” for the couple’s two children, their lawyers said.

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In her own letter to the judge, Marcia Abbott, 59, said her daughter had qualified for extended time on standardized tests long before meeting Singer and that it was only later she realized Singer was suggesting the girl cheat on her tests.

“I should have walked away, but by then I saw him as a lifeline, and was afraid what might happen to my daughter if I backed out,” she wrote.

In a letter to Talwani that didn’t mention Gregory Abbott, the couple’s daughter sought leniency for her mother.

“Everything my mom has done has been for my health and protection,” she wrote, “and I am horrified and sad that her best intentions for me led her to Rick Singer.”

The case is U.S. v. Abbott, 19-cr-10117, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).

--With assistance from Janelle Lawrence.

To contact the reporter on this story: Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey

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