Teacher caught on tape helping students cheat

A teacher was caught on tape asking students to change their answers on a test they had taken when video footage of the incident was released to the media Wednesday.

According to the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education, a Korean-language teacher surnamed Hong suddenly suspended a class he had been teaching and called in four students from a different class. The video shows Hong taking out the grammar tests the students had taken and ordering them to correct their mistakes as other students in the classroom watched.

“This answer is completely wrong,” Hong tells one student in the video. “This is the answer. Write it down.” He tells another student, “You need to make a lot of corrections.”

The test was a midterm that affects the students’ university applications. The footage was secretly shot by a student who was in the classroom at the time and given to the media later.

The school responded Wednesday by saying, “According to our investigation, Hong called the students in and asked them to correct their answers on a test they had recently taken. But Hong says that the students’ answers were close to the correct answers and he just helped to clarify them.”

According to the school, the four students belong to one of the school’s three advanced classes, which are filled with top students. Over the past decade, the school has run three advanced classes and four ordinary classes, which is prohibited by the Gyeonggi Education Office.

By Choi Mo-ran [heejin@joongang.co.kr]