For the First Time, SAT Test Gets Canceled in an Entire Country
By Kayla Webley | Time.com – Fri, May 10, 2013
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 because of allegations of widespread cheating.
Have you come to hate the word "dream" as much as I have?
It’s the first time the SAT test has been called off in an entire country.
... Test center managers told the Journal 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.
More willing? Koreans tend to be nationalistic and effective, so I suspect they're mostly better at cheating.
The more interesting question is who have been less willing to cheat? The answer appears to be: those awful Northern Europeans who can hardly be forgiven for having set up most of the institutions of the modern world.
Could there be a connection between European conceptions of honor and the success of European institutions? And how to encourage European behavior when Europeans are the default bad guys.
