Research: Cheating Update

There are only three South Korean universities that count in Koreans' eyes and they enroll 15,000 students, chosen from 873,000 applicants (1.7%), based on the results of a national exam. The night before the national exam, many mothers pray all night in temple. (They also prayed the previous 99 nights, but not so long.) The country comes to a virtual halt to ensure that the kids get to the test centers on time because the examinations are truly life determining. This sounds like a setting ripe for cheating, and recently it was. Shortly after the author sent the January column, "A Nation of Cheats," to the editors, an enormous cheating scandal related to the national exam used to determine university admissions broke in South Korea's Gwangju province. This cheating operation used text-messaging phones so that test-takers and answer-providers could communicate. About 150 participants have been identified so far, but 248,000 text messages sent during the testing period are still being examined. Unfortunately, this type of cheating is not an isolated event. Also in this column, a discussion of Finland's success on international student assessments.