A group of unethical college prep schools in southern Seoul has brought shame on the nation by allegedly helping students who were preparing to get into U.S. universities cheat on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
They are suspected of having provided students with SAT questions, which they have obtained through illegal means. This has led the U.S. College Board, a nonprofit organization that administers the exam, to cancel the May test in Korea, which was slated for last Saturday.
Korea has fallen into disgrace by becoming the first country in the world where a round of the U.S. university admission test has been canceled because of cheating attempts.
The cram schools have been investigated by prosecutors since February for allegedly collecting huge amounts of money from parents for providing their children with sample SAT questions.
These prep schools had their SAT teachers sit for tests in foreign countries in order to collect sample questions. As SAT tests rely on an item pool, questions from previous tests could be presented in later exams.
Prosecutors who raided the six schools in Seoul’s Gangnam district seized computer hard disks and sent them to the Education Testing Service, the U.S. company that creates and scores the SATs, to confirm whether they contained test materials.
The U.S. firm concluded that many questions of the May test might have already been leaked to Korean test takers.
It was not the first time that Korean cram schools provided sample SAT questions to students. In 2007, the ETS nullified the test scores of about 900 Korean students after it was found that exam questions were leaked to them.
Cheating attempts have also been made on other standardized exams, such as the Graduate Record Examination, which is an admissions requirement for many U.S. graduate schools, and TOEFL. The ETS suspended the GRE test in Korea between 2002 and 2011, forcing Korean students to travel to Japan to take the exam.
The ETS could take a similar step for the SATs if Korean prep schools continue to illegally collect sample questions and leak them to students. This would cause inconvenience to many Korean students planning to get into U.S. universities. More than 1,500 students applied to take the SAT in Korea in May.
The government needs to come forward and rein in greedy and unethical cram schools. And parents should realize that students who earn high SAT scores through cheating and manage to get into prestigious U.S. universities will have a hard time keeping up with their schoolwork. Education is not about taking shortcuts.
