By What jumped out at me about this story was not the fraud but how much this guy was making teaching students how to take the SAT:
Police are investigating whether a lecturer at a private language institute, or hagwon, in Gangnam, southern Seoul, identified by the surname Kim, 37, allegedly helped two Korean students to cheat on the United States-based Scholastic Aptitude Test, officials said yesterday.
The students were studying in the U.S. at the time.
Kim allegedly sent them a copied test and answer sheets from Thailand to the U.S. by taking advantage of the time difference.
The SAT, which is administered by the U.S.-based Educational Testing Service, is the exam for students who want to gain admission to U.S. colleges.
The Suseo Police Precinct in Gangnam said that Kim allegedly obtained the sheets from a Thai test-taker who took the test in Bangkok on Jan. 24 of last year.
Then Kim allegedly sent the sheets via e-mail to two Korean high school students surnamed Kim and Lee who took the same exam twelve hours later in a test center in the U.S. state of Connecticut, investigators said.
Even though the SAT is taken at test centers worldwide on the same day, the test in Bangkok is 12 hours earlier than the one in Connecticut.
Police said the lecturer allegedly received the test paper around 3 p.m. (Thailand local time) and sent it to the students with the answer sheet around 5:30 p.m.
The students checked the test material the same day, said officers.
Investigators raided Kim’s office in the institute and obtained the original version of the test. Police also searched Kim’s e-mail to the students.
Kim is widely known among students who are preparing for the SAT and their parents as a top instructor. He was paid between 2.8 million ($2,486) and 3 million won per lecture. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
It looks like this guy will have to use all the money he made to find himself a good lawyer.
The Hankyoreh has a whole lot more on how this guy pulled this fraud off to include paying only 15,000 won in Thailand to get the test papers and that the students he committed the fraud for scored extremely high on the test and are currently in prestigious US universities.
4:03 pm on January 19th, 2010 1
Shouldn't the kids be kicked out of school?
6:01 pm on January 19th, 2010 2
It makes you wonder how many have gotten away with it.
6:05 pm on January 19th, 2010 3
Funny how they were given ALL THE CORRECT ANSWERS but still failed to score the max.
7:29 pm on January 19th, 2010 4
I'm not surprised. In my experience, students who resort to cheating are never the brightest ones (or even the average ones).
7:30 pm on January 19th, 2010 5
…and I doubt he's the only one who sells test sheets.
8:05 pm on January 19th, 2010 6
I don't we should try to kid ourselves ~ it's not just a Korean thing.
American kids would do (probably are doing) the same thing if given the opportunity.
9:05 pm on January 19th, 2010 7
Again like anyother story…WHO CARES! Koreans cheat and lie more than anybody else to get ahead! Is this relevant to anything except Koreans making themselves like more like assholes to the rest of the world!
10:36 pm on January 19th, 2010 8
Koreans have been using the time difference trick for years.
11:15 pm on January 19th, 2010 9
So what's the problem?
They are ahead of the class already.
They obviously already possess the skills to be a journalist, a politician or a climate scientist.
12:56 am on January 20th, 2010 10
I wonder if they realize how badly they are shooting themselves in their collective feet? I had a long talk once with an admissions counselor at a major university. He told me admissions departments tended to downpplay high SAT/ACT test scores submitted by Asians. There is a belief these scores tend to show a person who has memorized a bunch of data but probably is not at all prepared to manipulate it or expand upon it. Examples like this one only make matters worse.
Note this isn't limited to just Koreans.
1:11 am on January 20th, 2010 11
I would like to know how he got caught.
2:04 am on January 20th, 2010 12
The guy was in the business of helping people cheat on exams. He had to somehow let people know that he could help them cheat. I would imagine he was really careful about how he went about letting people know – and I'm also sure he swore them to secrecy. But if someone is willing to cheat on an exam – are they really someone you can trust? And what about the people who turned him down? They didn't cheat – but now they know about the scam.
And who knows…maybe some family payed him a pile of cash and their in spite of having the answers – their kid did lousy on the test. So then the family exposes this guy.
Or suppose a kid who was offered the test sheets – but turned them down – and he just barely misses out on getting into an Ivy league school – but he finds out that this other kid who isn't that bright did cheat and he got it. The kid that didn't get in is going to sing like a bird about the cheating scam.
There are lots of possible scenarios.
4:22 am on January 20th, 2010 13
You wouldn't want to get a supremely high score and draw attention to yourself.
Besides, the way the test is administered by ETS and used by universities, a perfect or near-perfect score is unnecessary: It's all based on a curve from 200 to 800 and if you get around 600, you're doing quite all right, even Ivy League eligible.
2:05 pm on January 20th, 2010 14
Nah, the guy's probably weren't all that smart.
2:15 pm on January 20th, 2010 15
"Nah, the guy’s probably weren’t all that smart."
That should be, "Nah, the guy's probably WASN'T all that smart."
…unless he had two probablies, in which case it would be O.K. to say, "Nah, the guy's probablies weren't all that smart."
…which begs the question, what the hell is a probably, how dumb are they and why would a guy even have one?
3:10 pm on January 20th, 2010 16
i'm not surprised by this story at all. most students in korea would rather cheat use their awesome rote memorization skills after correcting the wrong answers. it's nothing new and nothing that is not accepted or expected from koreans. the thing that they don't realize is that american universities have the most rigorous academics in the world, so if you cheat to get in doesn't mean you will be successful.
3:54 pm on January 20th, 2010 17
As a PhD-seeking grad student, I've been a lecturer for two American universities and a teaching assistant at one, and the notions that American students don't contain a not insignificant number in their ranks and/or that said cheaters are not good at cheating are laughable.
People who have a lot at stake may be more tempted to cheat. In Korea, that might be someone who feels they must get into a top school (e.g., a top Korean undergrad program and later a top American grad program), or in America, an athlete who stands to lose a scholarship worth upwards to $100K or more.
When I was an SAT instructor in Orange County back in college in the 1990s, I was made serious offers (one for $10K) if I were to take the SAT or GRE for someone. The guy making the $10K offer was desperate, and frankly I have no idea if he got someone to do it.
4:52 pm on January 20th, 2010 18
Unless of course…you continue to cheat and you're really good at it.
5:41 pm on January 20th, 2010 19
One fine typo, by the way.
5:46 pm on January 20th, 2010 20
It was a typo…
The guys probably weren't all that smart…Yes, I'm using the plural of a masculine noun without knowing if one or two of the students were female. Screw political correctness.
10:30 pm on January 20th, 2010 21
CH, do you want to open the typo WH can? I don't, but I'm willing to take pot shots at you.
11:54 pm on January 20th, 2010 22
"CH, do you want to open the typo WH can? I don’t, but I’m willing to take pot shots at you."
No… my bad. Please don't hurt me.
I never have poked at people over this with seriousness because, well, nobody is expected to put PhD thesis-quality proofreading into an off-hand post on a blog.
This was all in good fun as Teadrinker might be a hissing Canadian liberal but he is neither dumb or uneducated… and I can guess he saw I was having fun with his mistake rather than criticizing it or judging him by it.
Unless some whiner is seriously picking apart someone's writing with a poorly-written critique or bragging about what a good "teacher" they are while making elementary mistakes, sniping at someone's writing is awful petty.
…but that doesn't mean they don't set themselves up as a target if their mistake is extra (unintentionally) funny.
Sorry Teadrinker… I hope the guy got his probably into some remedial night classes so it could smarten up… otherwise it could knock up a possibly and have a bunch of hungry maybes to feed on a single welfare check.
5:32 am on January 21st, 2010 23
We'll never hear any more about the "further investigation" as hush money is paid to everyone in authority in Korea, and the Korean police go back to sleep.
5:31 pm on January 21st, 2010 24
Really? 10K for an SAT or GRE? Seems like you would know which one it was and I find it incredulous that anyone who had the money at their disposal would find it worth it to pay someone to take the SAT for them…with the possible exception of a high school athlete, illegally using an agent to help him get eligibility to a college ball program. At any rate, you and I went to the same program here in Korea and I doubt a single one of the Korean students there can claim ownership of all the scholarship they turned in. While cheaters abound in the US, the rate doesn't hover just below 100% and the penalty, at least in my experience, was an unequivocal "F" and expulsion. Here it's expected and the offender chastised but nothing more severe outside the college entrance exams.