Another Cheating in South Korea?

Test Preparation
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@marvin100‌

Well, okay, we can indeed be civil, but only if you would acknowledge your mistakes without trying to sidestep the truth and justify your inconsistencies with feeble explanations to the contrary or digressing from the argument at hand.

You acknowledge that your discrepancy was perhaps a minor mistake, but still assert that there might be a modicum of truth underlying it. The June 2014 domestic exam and the June 2014 international exam are two very different exams; hence, the fact that the College Board issued an exam from the same month and year is indeed purely coincidence. It’s like trying to say that the “Koreans” were responsible for the terrorist attacks or that the “New York” team won the World Series. There are, since you live on the Korean peninsula, two very different types of Koreans – the North Koreans and the South Koreans, and one should clearly distinguish between the two.

Really? Have I not made it clear throughout almost every single one of my prior posts that it is “grossly discriminatory” to generalize and lump all the Koreans into the same category as all the cheaters without providing some type of concrete proof instead of spreading an unsubstantiated, bogus rumor? The harm is as clear as night and day! Obviously, if I’m an innocent Korean test-taker, but everyone else around me is saying that the “Koreans” are cheating yet again, it’s safe to say that I may indeed be suspected without any warranted justification and lumped together into the same group. Such harm can come in the form of another mass score delay or a test cancellation or even in the college admissions process, where admissions officers may not believe that my scores are legitimate. I find it oddly curious that you keep footing the blame on the College Board without seeing my posts for what they are genuinely are–an attempt to rectify the unfair accusations made towards fellow Korean students.

Based on your prior posts, I can see that you are a well-respected and conscientious poster who would like to put an end to all the cheating, but I cringe everytime you adamantly assert something that is, once again, completely false.

The College Board did indeed recycle a test domestically (yes, that means in the U.S.!) just last month in December, when it reused the 2013 November domestic exam in 2014 December in the UNITED STATES! So, obviously, this disgusting practice of recycling exams is not just happening internationally, but also domestically. And I know you’re once again going to say that I shouldn’t “blame the messenger” or defend the Collegeboard or any of the cheaters, and I most certainly am not. My point of contention was simply that we shouldn’t start to generalize and accuse “the Koreans” of cheating when it didn’t even occur!

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Students should not cheat, but given the huge number of students, there are bound to be some who cannot resist the temptation to cheat. Reusing tests just makes it easier for cheaters to cheat. This applies to college and high school, as well as on standardized tests like the SAT or the radiology board exams.

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@AlfredoKim‌

That’s not very civil at all, but I’ll respond anyway, since I have a little time right now.

That’s an unreasonable analogy. It’s more like saying “I hated that class with Professor Wood” when you meant “I hated that class with Professor Woods.” June 2014 Domestic isn’t a subset of June 2014 International (or vice versa), and neither is a broader generalization than the other. They’re the same year, the same month, but different administrations. Your view that it’s a coincidence is, as I’ve said before, reasonable; my view that it’s a minor inaccuracy is also reasonable. What’s unreasonable is your unmitigated certainty that only your interpretation is correct.

The rumor did not lump all the Koreans into the same category, nor have any of my comments. I work with hundreds of innocent, hard-working Korean students every year, so I know better than most what a small minority the cheaters represent. And even the original rumor said that “Some Korean private SAT prep companies” had the test (and it qualified its claim by stating clearly that “this may be a rumor without substance”).

History has shown that non-cheaters don’t actually suffer from skepticism–year after year there are cheating rumors and even actual, proven cheating scandals (I’ve been here for all of them), and year after year colleges keep accepting Korean students (although the rise of China is eating into that number somewhat, which only goes to show that rumors about Chinese cheating aren’t hurting Chinese applicants either!).

As for the more concrete forms of harm–“mass score delay or a test cancellation”–these only occur when cheating is found to have happened, in which case you can’t blame the rumor because it is the known existence of cheating that has caused the delay or cancellation. No scores have been delayed and no tests have been canceled because of rumors, and this won’t be the first.

Believe me when I say that my investment, my bias, is on the side of the innocent Korean test takers. I’ve been helping them reach their goals without cheating since 2002. It absolutely makes my blood boil when tests are canceled, but I’m mad at the cheaters and those who helped them cheat (obviously) and at the College Board (which is very aware of the problems with recycling tests and has chosen to do nothing about it). You’re mad at the OP, who–in good faith and with ample qualification/caveats–passed on a rumor that turned out to be not quite provably true. You can go ahead and feel that way, but I continue to believe your anger is misdirected.

Thanks for acknowledging my good faith and posting history.

That’s one time, whereas almost all the international tests in the last 6 years have been recycled.

Neither I nor the OP is doing so. In fact, I couldn’t agree more that it’s unfair to judge all Koreans by the presence of a small minority of cheaters.

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@Marvin100–I said that an end to recycled tests would require the production of 20 new tests a year because I was including Sunday tests in my calculations. If we also include makeup tests–such as the ones that will be given for U.S. East Coast students who were snowed out last Saturday–then the number would surely be considerably higher than 20. You say the College Board has enough revenue, but I’m not sure that’s the only pertinent issue–I really doubt ETS has enough qualified personnel to triple or quadruple production on demand.

As for the June 2014 U.S. vs. June 2014 international issue–I suspect that rumor started simply because the December 2014 international had been a repeat of March 2014 U.S., and people simply guessed that the next international test would likely be a repeat of the next unreleased U.S. test. If my suspicions are correct, then the reappearance of the June 2014 international test in HK and Singapore is indeed merely a coincidence.

(Let me emphasize that Bob Schaeffer of FairTest was quite explicit that he had received an electronic copy of whatever was circulating in Korea and that he had determined that it was June 2014 U.S. I don’t believe him–but the rumor seems to have been unambiguous on the U.S. point.)

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You may be correct about the source of the rumor, but it’s also not that hard to go through the history and see which tests have already been recycled internationally and which haven’t. That might not narrow it down to a single test, but it will narrow it down to a manageable handful.

And even if you don’t illegally acquire unreleased exams, you can compile pretty good answer banks by reading old CC threads. It’s the test recycling that’s the problem, and unless ETS is willing to stop recycling tests, the problem will persist as it has for years, allowing unscrupulous cheaters to prosper. Oof I hate that.

You may also be right that the bottleneck for test making is qualified personnel. But that’s a very surmountable problem, so if that’s the bottleneck, ETS should be able to overcome it with little difficulty.

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@marvin100‌

You know what? Either way you look at it, nobody is really going to win this argument, as each side is not willing to concede. I was simply angry at the fact that Koreans were once again targeted in such a vicious and discriminatory manner. Whether or not such claims do or did hurt any Koreans is something nobody can really know until some type of cheating is actually proven, as you stated. Whatever the case, I do not have the time to exhaust my brain with rebuttal after rebuttal. My intention was not to accuse or antagonize anyone, so if you felt that way, I apologize. I just hope that people will be much more careful in making such dubious claims of cheating, whether there are ample qualifications and caveats or not. If you do hear anything of cheating, report it to the proper authorities; there is simply no need to come onto a public forum, especially as one as reputable and well-known as CC, and inflame others with bogus claims.

Anyhow, I’m done here. Have a good day.

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Aside from “vicious and discriminatory,” I’m fine with that. Cheers, and good luck to you.

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Throwing the baby out with the bath water…

If this intel is true, then there is nothing to do else.

And I don’t know why this always happens in Korea, since its people are really hardworking, there shouldn’t be any need for this, right?

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The thing is, hard work is hard, and no matter how hard-working the majority of the kids are, there will always be those with more money than integrity. If cheating is indeed more widespread in Korean (and China) than other countries, I suspect that’s partly because students from those two countries make up the largest number of international applicants to US colleges.

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Those who doubted my claims above, please note the following.

As has already been discussed, before January 24, Bob Schaeffer of “FairTest” claimed to have received an advance copy of the January 2015 SAT, which he said appeared to be identical to the test administered in the U.S. in June 2014:

http://www.fairtest.org/widespread-sat-cheating-continues-asia

Now that that story has been definitively falsified by events (the June 2014 test was not reused anywhere), he has abandoned in entirely. He is now claiming that before the January test, he received copies of the June 2014 international test and the October 2012 U.S. test–the two that were used internationally in January:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/01/29/sat-questions-posted-online-before-exam-was-recently-given-in-asia/

Yet he made no mention of either of these tests before January 24, and he makes no mention of the June 2014 U.S. test now.

Do you see my point now?

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@napat98 - From your link: "a source sent FairTest a website link to what purports to be the test scheduled for use in Asia on Saturday, January 24. It appears to be an exam form administered in the U.S. in June 2014. Multiple other sources report that test coaching companies in China and South Korea are selling access to this document.”

This has not been “falsified by events” because it was “purported” and says “sources report.” Rumors may not wind up being accurate, but that does not mean Schaeffer’s claims have been falsified because he acknowledged that these are rumors from sources.

Your second link says “some if not all of the questions on two versions of the exam given that day were posted online, and a week in advance of the exam, a U.S. nonprofit organization known as FairTest received a PDF of one of the SAT test forms.” But this too has not been falsified. It’s quite possible that Schaeffer was given access to multiple tests, and at no point did he claim to know for sure that the Jan 2015 international test would be the June 2014 exam.

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I also somewhat understand why you’re carrying on your vendetta against Schaeffer and Strauss in the other thread (the topic, after all, is about the reportage), but this thread is about cheating, not journalism–if, as you claim, your beef with Schaeffer and Strauss is unrelated to your belief that cheating has been happening, and if, as you claim, you are also mad at the cheaters, then why are you so bent on smearing Schaeffer and Strauss at every opportunity?

I understand you seem to think their reporting harms you in some way, but in what way? If they’re wrong and there is no cheating, scores are released and all is well (in fact, that’s also true when there is cheating that the CB can’t uncover in its investigations). If scores are withheld and/or exams are canceled, that only happens when cheating is clearly discovered by the CB. So you see, if you are being harmed at all, it is because of the cheaters, not the messengers.

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@marvin100‌

You are correct that he may have included enough tentative language (“purports,” “appears,” and so on) to be able able to escape charges of outright lying–if outright lying is all we are concerned about.

I would say that the charge of dishonesty nevertheless still applies because Schaeffer changes his story completely to match whatever narrative suits his agenda. When a College Confidential post reports that Koreans are selling copies of the June 2014 U.S. test–well, Bob Schaeffer’s “sources” have conveniently sent him that. When it turns out that the June 2014 U.S. was a red herring and that the actual tests used were June 2014 international and October 2012 international–well, no problem: in hindsight, it turns out that Schaeffer’s “sources” had also sent him copies of June 2014 international and October 2012 international, although he didn’t think to mention those before. And that story about the June 2014 U.S. test? Well, that little embarrassment is conveniently forgotten.

A disinterested observer examining the facts here would have to conclude that the Korean SAT cheating industry is laughably inept and that anyone trying to cheat on the January test had been thoroughly routed by ETS and probably lost a good deal of money as well. That’s not how Strauss and Schaeffer are spinning these events, though; no matter how circumstances change, those two always seem to have exactly the right anonymous information they need to make their own narrative stand–but they never offer any proof.

I’m completely sure I’m not the only one who finds this state of affairs more than suspicious. As other posters have pointed out, this is not journalism. A journalist can rely on her own anonymous sources, but second-hand anonymous sources? From an advocate with a dog in the fight? That’s basically what all these stories are–“I heard it from a friend who who hates the SAT that he heard from some other guy I don’t know that the SAT is bad.” Who ever heard of such a thing appearing in a respectable newspaper?

As I’ve said before, @marvin100, I don’t find my motivations to be especially relevant or worthy of exploration, and I’m not going to be goaded by language like “vendetta,” “beef,” “smear,” and so on.

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That’s reasonable, and I’m sorry for using loaded language. I’ll be more civil.

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I think for those who claim that only a small minority of the test takers in Korea/China cheat with this scheme miss the point entirely about the overall impact of this on admissions to elite colleges. Since internationals do not take APs, and at least in China, their GPAs are completely fabricated, the only way to determine who gets in or not is by looking at the SAT scores. Remember in US there are only about 0.5% of the SAT test takers score 2300+, and let’s say about 1% of the test takers in Korea and China cheat and resulted in scores of 2300+ (it’s reasonable to assume that outcome otherwise why cheat?), then one’d expect that about 2/3 of the Ivy league internationals from Korea/China probably gained entry with false credentials. The point of this is that a small/tiny minority can and will have an enormous impact on admissions to elite colleges.

Given that non-resident/internationals represent roughly 20% of the last year’s incoming class at Columbia, and close to 800 for all SAT sections at the “upper 25% SAT range” for the top 5 ranked schools on USNW, the colleges will not and cannot afford to lose this important source of tuition revenue and ranking booster, cheating or not.

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International students do indeed take APs, IBs, IGCSEs, A Levels, etc.

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And GPAs are definitely not “completely fabricated” at international schools and well-known foreign language high schools with study-abroad programs.