<p>To gain a better insight into why students in Korea cheat on such a prevalent basis and why College Board seemingly does nothing to address these problems, let us first examine some key points that have been brought up in other posts.</p>
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<li>In response to why Koreans seem to cheat so much, I don’t think we need to be educated on Korean society. It’s a well-known fact, even in America, that Asians in general, not just Koreans, are extremely competitive and hold themselves to higher academic standards than your average American student. In Korea, the competitiveness is even more intense as the number of university entrance slots and jobs available is extremely limited in comparison to the extensive number of applicants. But if you really want to examine the understand the mitigating circumstances or underlying factors that contribute to rampant cheating in Korea, let’s look at a few examples. </li>
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<p>In Korea, we have the Korean Bar Exam, the equivalent of the American Bar. On an annual basis, you might have anywhere from several thousand to ten thousand people apply to take the exam (I give you these rough statistics because I don’t have exact figures). 50% will make the initial 1st round-cutline based solely on multiple-choice exams. Out of the other half that remain to take a rigorous 3-day examination of multiple essays, only several hundred will make the final cut and be given their licenses. Now, you have to consider the fact that students who do not make it past the first round only fail to do so by a differential of 1 or 2 points. Yes, not a 1 or 2% differential, but an actual difference of 1 to 2 points, and you also have to consider that the majority of those who fail to make the first cutline are actually top-notch students from the top 3 universities in Korea (Seoul National University, Yonsei University, and Korea University). Perhaps that will give you a better understanding of just how competitive studying in Korea is. In other words, even though you enter and graduate from a top university, there is no guarantee of success. In fact, lawyers in Korea joke that in America, you pass the Bar Exam easily, then you get to prove your true skills, whereas in Korea, you have to work like a slave to pass the exam, but once you do, paradise is open to you as long as you know how to take a bribe or two.</p>
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<li>Now if we put this into the perspective of students in Korea who study for the SAT, you can easily see from the aforementiond example why parents who have the money to do so would send their kids to study in America and even cheat if need be. So, what kinds of students cheat? Obviously, if you have enough money to send your kids abroad to America, you’re not poor.</li>
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<p>So, in essence, you have two types of kids who cheat. 1) Dumb kids with rich parents who have absolutely no hope to raise their score past 1600 on their own. 2) The majority of those who cheat, however, are fairly smart, at least by American standards, and could easily get at least 2100-2200 just by studying on their own. You see, rich parents of really dumb kids know that even if they were to spend a crap of money to buy illegal tests for their kids and they somehow got a good score, their kids wouldn’t hack it in America. So, then you have the rest of these kids who are desperate to score at least 2300 and enter a prestigious American university, because in Korea, other people don’t acknowledge or even know of schools like Harvey Mudd (which happens to be an excellent liberal arts school), only top Ivies like Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. So, from the perspective of many parents, there is simply no point of sending their kids to some college in America that Koreans don’t even know of, especially since the name of your college determines your chances of landing a good job more than your actual competence. </p>
<p>In Korea, there is another saying that “if you study 10 minutes longer, the face of your future husband or wife may change.” This ludicrous statement clearly shows the extent to which credentialism and superficial standards dominate Korean society. In other words, in Korea, the mindset is that you better either have a brand-name college degree or a beautiful face if you want to succeed. </p>
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<li><p>So yes, it is perhaps easier to understand why so many students in Korea might actually cheat, but does this justify cheating or cause us to sympathize with those who do? By no means! Cheating cannot be justified simply because Koreans are under enormous pressure to succeed and have the highest suicide rates in the world anymore than we can justify a 14-year old gangbanger shooting a person in the face just because his parents abandoned him and he has grown up in poverty his entire life. </p></li>
<li><p>So why doesn’t College Board acknowledge the severity of the problem and stop using old domestic tests internationally? Stop a second, and let’s ask ourselves how serious of a problem cheating really is, at least in the eyes of ETS or College Board. The number of students who actually cheat is relatively small compared to the millions who take the test annually. So, while several hundred students who cheated on the SAT might cause a media frenzy and outrage other students, in the eyes of College Board, it is merely a nuisance, a drop in the bucket, so to speak, and does not compromise the overall intregity of their test. I’m not saying College Board doesn’t care, but what you have to ask yourself is whether College Board is willing to spend several hundred dollars to create a new test to resolve a problem, that to them, is fairly insignificant. Now, who knows? College Board might actually take some more extreme measures to stop cheating this time around, but is this something new, and what, up to this point, has College Board really done when other similar cheating scandals erupted? That shows the lack of seriousness with which they have, at least hitherto, addressed the problem of cheating. </p></li>
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<p>Now, I might be rambling, as I often have a tendency to do, but I hope this will at least give you guys some better insight into this whole issue of cheating in Korea or in Asia. I could also be wrong, as some of the stuff I’ve mentioned is based on pure speculation that I’ve deduced on my own and my own opinions, so feel free to correct me if need be.</p>