A group of SAT prep school directors gathers yesterday at the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education in Jongno District, central Seoul, for a workshop and pledges not to leak questions, drive students too hard, or make false or exaggerated claims in advertisements for their hagwon. They also requested that the municipal office reveal the names of tarnished hagwon to protect their reputations. Provided by Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education

For high school juniors bound for U.S. colleges, almost nothing is as important as the SATs, the college admissions test. So what happens when the exam gets canceled throughout your country?

David Cho, 17, thought he had mapped out his junior year. He was one of some 1,500 students in Korea slated to take the May SATs. He planned to take them again in June if he needed to improve his scores. That left him free over the summer to prepare for three SAT Subject Tests, or SAT IIs, in October, and start working on his college applications.

Cho’s plans crumbled after a series of SAT cancellations, beginning with the SAT General Reasoning Test cancellation in May, the first time it has been canceled for an entire country.

Cho first heard the news through Facebook on April 30, four days before the scheduled exam date. He thought it was a stupid rumor until the next day when he received an official e-mail from the College Board, the test administrator.

“We were frustrated when we found out,” Cho said, voice strained. “Many of us had finals to study for and AP [Advanced Placement] exams to prepare for, on top of school and extracurricular activities. We sacrificed a lot of time to prepare for the SATs.” The AP exams are college-level curriculum programs also administered by the College Board and take place in May nationwide.

Some students, afraid of further cancellations in Korea, signed up for the June exams in Japan. When the best test locations in Japan filled up, some signed up for places in Hong Kong.

On May 18, the SAT Biology Subject Test exam for June was canceled in Korea. Then, last Saturday, some Korean students were notified they will be barred from taking the exam in Korea or any other test centers.

The reason was the same for all three cancellations: test questions were obtained and allegedly leaked by certain hagwon, or cram schools, based in the posh, educational neighborhood, Gangnam District in southern Seoul.

Cho has now ruled out the option of applying early decision to colleges because he’s running out of time to get everything done.

Some of his friends opted to take the exam in Japan, but Cho is dubious. “If the College Board can cancel the exam for students in Korea, what’s to say that they won’t look at our addresses and keep us from taking the exam in another country?”

The SAT cram schools in Korea are not the standard prep courses which usually involve a couple of months of instruction in mock SAT questions.

They are elite, exclusive test-cracking institutes that make enormous profits and are based mostly in the affluent Apgujeong and Gangnam area. Parents pay between 10-20 million won ($8,870-17,740) a month to enroll their kids. They often require upfront cash payments. Some enroll with fake names to protect their identities.

And the cram schools sometimes really deliver, providing the students with actual questions that will appear on upcoming SAT tests allegedly stolen from testing centers outside of Korea.

And some students, after paying all that money, still bomb the SATs. Refunds aren’t given.


By Sarah Kim