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Cheating scandals expose universities’ complacency

Published: 12 Nov. 2025, 00:02

Ahn Hai-ri

The author is an editorial writer at the JoongAng Ilbo.

Recent incidents of cheating at Yonsei University and Korea University were met with disbelief — not because it was shocking that such acts occurred at prestigious schools, but because of how lazy and irresponsible the institutions themselves appeared. As some professors lamented the loss of trust and integrity, I found it hard not to think that the real scandal lay in the universities’ indifference.

Allegations of large-scale cheating using artificial intelligence during midterm exams at Yonsei University have sparked controversy. Students are seen walking on the university’s Sinchon campus in Seodaemun District, Seoul, on Nov. 10. [NEWS1]

To be clear, this is not a defense of students who cheated, nor a blanket criticism of the professors involved. But before treating suspected cheaters like Cold War spies — threatening disciplinary expulsion unless they confess — these universities, calling themselves sanctuaries of intellect, should have first reflected on their own failures.

The details reveal just how absurd the situation has become. Yonsei’s class at the center of the scandal enrolled 600 students; Korea University’s had 1,434. It is astonishing that in normal times — not during a pandemic — elite universities ran fully online lectures and exams for hundreds or even thousands of students. No matter how many teaching assistants were assigned, one professor could hardly have managed a fair assessment for so many. Even without the cheating, the system itself was unsustainable from the start. The issue is not simply one of exam design or plagiarism prevention. It is the sheer negligence of holding mass online classes as a cost-saving routine.

In Yonsei’s case, the problem is even more troubling. Unlike Korea University’s general education course, this was a three-credit major elective at the College of Artificial Intelligence Convergence. Whatever financial strain the university may face, this shows not frugality but disregard for students paying full tuition. On the student community app “Everytime,” many complained about deteriorating quality, writing that the absence of proper classrooms and real-time instruction made the course meaningless and calling for smaller class sizes. Yet the university ignored these warnings, saving money on facilities and faculty costs, and is now pointing fingers only at students who cheated.

Students are not blameless. “Everytime” had long been full of posts calling such online courses “sweet classes” where good grades came easily. Some wrote, “If online exams continue, this is the easiest A+ ever,” or “Everything is recorded lectures — miss two questions and you still get an A+, below that’s a B, but it’s so easy.” Others bragged, “I didn’t study and still got an A+.” Professors and universities, content with low-cost teaching, and students, happy to earn credits with minimal effort, formed a symbiotic complacency that corrupted both sides.

Still, the greater fault lies with the universities. Running a 600-student online major course without serious thought about evaluation methods in the age of rapid digital change is an institutional failure. If these classes exist merely as revenue generators under the pretense of education, then the problem is deeper than academic dishonesty — it is moral dishonesty at the institutional level.

The irony runs even deeper in Yonsei’s case. The course at the center of the scandal was titled “Natural Language Processing and ChatGPT.” The syllabus promised “a conceptual and practical understanding of how machines process, understand and generate human language using the latest deep learning techniques.” Yet the course was evaluated in the most old-fashioned way possible, ignoring the very principles of technological innovation it claimed to teach.

Experts agree that in the AI era, education must focus less on rote answers and more on problem-solving skills. But Korea’s universities, instead of adapting to rapid technological shifts, cling to outdated methods while searching for easier ways to extract tuition revenue. If they continue down this path — lazy, unreflective and blind to change — not even the most prestigious of institutions will survive. What is worse, they may not even realize how serious the crisis has become.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.