Some 1,500 South Korean students who dream of attending elite
American colleges are scrambling after the U.S.-based administrator of
the SAT cancelled the scheduled May 4 session of the exam due to
allegations of widespread cheating. It’s the first time the SAT test has
been called off in an entire country.
Officials decided to cancel the exam after discovering test questions
circulating in test-prep centers in the country, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The College Board, which administers the SAT in the U.S., and the
Educational Testing Service (ETS), the non-profit organization that
develops, publishes and scores the tests, issued a statement, saying
they had made the “difficult, but necessary” decision to cancel the
exam. “This action is being taken in response to information provided to
ETS—the College Board’s vendor for global test administration and
security—by the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office regarding tutoring companies
in the Republic of Korea that are alleged to have illegally obtained
SAT and SAT Subject Test materials for their own commercial benefit.”
The details are scarce, but a CNN report
says the prosecutors’ office confirmed it had raided several testing
centers for evidence and the WSJ story notes that at least 10 staff
members of test centers have been barred from leaving the country while
the prosecutors’ office investigates.
Test center managers told the WSJ that the problem is widespread and
that official test booklets can be purchased from brokers for about
$4,575—a relatively small price to pay for families fighting to gain
admittance to Harvard, Stanford and other prestigious American schools no matter the cost. According to the Institute of International Education’s most recent annual report,
South Korea sent 72,295 students to study in the U.S. in the 2011-12
school year, making the country the third largest provider of foreign
students to U.S. colleges after China
and India. Worldwide, international student enrollment at U.S. colleges
has soared in recent years with a record 764,495 foreign students
attending American universities in 2011-12.
This is not the first incident of SAT cheating in South Korea. In
2007, some 900 students who took the exam in January of that year had their scores canceled
after an investigation found an unknown number of students had seen at
least part of the exam before the test was given. The latest incident,
plus a string of scandals in the country over the past year that saw at
least seven lawmakers accused of academic plagiarism, caused a South
Korean national newspaper to question whether its citizens are unusual
in their willingness to cheat.
But South Korea is hardly alone—the high stakes nature of the exam
has fueled cheating elsewhere, although on a smaller scale. Of the
nearly three million SAT exams taken worldwide each year, at least a few
thousand are canceled because of suspected cheating. Several hundred
other potential test takers are turned away at the door each year
because of questionable identification. In 2011, 20 students in Long
Island, New York were charged with cheating on the SAT—five were accused of taking the test for others and 15 were accused of paying them $500 to $3,600 to take the exams.
The College Board and ETS say they expect to be able to offer the SAT
in South Korea in June, but in the meantime, and out of fear of
additional problems, there have been reports of students flying to Japan
and Hong Kong to take the test there in order to get their scores in
time to apply for college in the U.S. this summer.
Sources :
http://world.time.com/2013/05/10/for-the-first-time-sat-test-gets-canceled-in-an-entire-country/
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