By Jane Han



NEW YORK — It's been several weeks since the ACT, the most widely used U.S. college entrance exam, was canceled in Korea over a breach of test materials. But Korean parents here are still sweating over candid questions about the notorious cheating culture of Korean students.



"It's embarrassing — so embarrassing," said Angela Kim, who heads a local group of Asian-American moms of high school students in Manhattan. "People cautiously and politely ask about the details of the test leak scandal in Korea, but no matter how polite, they're basically asking how in the world Korean students found a way to cheat on such a major exam."



On June 10, the Iowa-based exam administrator, ACT Inc., canceled the college entrance test at the last minute for thousands of students in South Korea and Hong Kong.



Just hours before some 5,500 students were scheduled to take the test, the company said in an emailed statement that they received "credible evidence that test materials intended for administration in these regions have been compromised."



This is the first time the ACT test was canceled for an entire country, just as it was the first time in 2013 that Korea was known to be the first case where the SAT, the best-known U.S. college entrance exam and a competitor of the ACT, was called off for an entire country over allegations of widespread cheating.



"This isn't an honorable record our mother country is setting," said Kim, mom to a tenth-grade son who plans to take the ACT next year. "Parents who have college-bound children closely follow news related to the SAT and ACT, so this kind of news spreads unbelievably fast."



Kwon Ji-young, a mother of two high schoolers in New Jersey, said before she even got a chance to see the news herself, a parent of one of her daughter's non-Korean friends mentioned it first.



"I was taken by surprise since I had no knowledge of what happened in Korea," she said, "but my first instinct was to defend Korea and Koreans by saying that cheating happens only among a very few students who ruin things for the rest."



Unfortunately, the reality is that cheating on crucial U.S. college entrance exams is indeed becoming more rampant in Korea and Asia as a whole.



The problem is becoming so serious that even admissions officers at U.S. colleges and universities are reportedly more inclined to be suspicious of exceptionally high scores that come from test takers in Korea.



"We're getting insider information that unusually high scores paired with mediocre school performance immediately raises a red flag for admissions officers," says Kim Il-joo, a counselor at a Manhattan-based college prep and consulting center.



"In a way, the recent cheating scandals are disadvantageous for Korean students across the board because they will now have to do more to prove their overall academic achievements," he said.



Amid heightening concerns over cheating, the College Board, which administers the SAT, abruptly began barring adults and all other non-student test takers from taking the SAT starting March 5. This is the first rule of its kind.



The SAT has so far been open to anyone who wanted to take the test regardless of their age and student status, but the change was "necessary," according to the company, as adults in the test prep industry have taken the tests themselves to build up their database of questions, which they later illegally sell to students at a high price.



