Police Notify Ministry of Education of 190 Suspected Exam Cheaters

A National Policy Agency official stated on Sunday that “we have handed over the first list of 190 suspected exam cheaters on this year’s College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) to the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development.”

The police have arrested 19 people after investigating a total of 325 people, including 123 people uncovered and 19 people related to substitutes taking the test for real applicants through probes of text messages nationwide, including the 183 suspected cheaters in the Gwangju area.

On the same day, the police received about 20,000 messages containing “specific text and numbers” from the three telecom companies and are going over the list which will possibly lead to more cases of mobile cheating.

A police official said, “Unlike the some 260,000 messages composed of only numbers, the number of messages composed of ‘specific text and numbers’ are only about 20,000. However, there’s a greater possibility of finding violations in those.”

It seems like the police investigation will continue even after December 6 when the Education Ministry calculates average scores after receiving the list of suspected cheaters from the police.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development held its first special committee conference on the exam scandal on Saturday and decided to nullify exam scores of suspected cheaters using mobile phones and who hired proxy testers.

During the conference, the committee looked into the matter of nullifying the exam scores of 138 students out of the 195 suspected exam cheaters notified by the police and determined the criteria of the scope of exam cheaters.

The committee is planning to hold a second conference on Monday, confirming the list of people whose scores will be nullified and who will be excluded when determining the average score, the centesimal scale and the ranking of applicant students.

If any objections are submitted with proof by December 13, the conference results will be reevaluated around December 16.