A new system for admissions to foreign language and international high schools was adopted by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology in January of this year. It placed greater emphasis on essays and teacher recommendations versus test scores and language certificates. This change in emphasis highlighted another threat, that of cheating on essays by hiring a ghostwriter from a private institute.
Consequently, the Ministry has now announced the introduction of a new system that targets student cheaters. If an essay has more than five consecutive words that are the same as on any other essays, the system will automatically highlight the common words so that examiners can judge whether a student cheated, according to the ministry. The system will indicate the name of the writer and what percentage two essays may have in common.
Good to see this shift away from test scores for multiple-choice tests...
ReplyDeleteAs for cheating on essays, and the effectiveness of automatic systems that are able to detect this kind of cheating, it may be interesting to read the following article, published online a couple of days ago.
"The Shadow Scholar"
http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/
As such, it would be good to also conduct complementary interviews with students in order to assess whether they have written their essays themselves...
On the other hand, hagwons seem to have found a new gap in the Korean education market...
ReplyDelete"Essay writing tutoring costs skyrocketing"
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/11/117_76783.html
It would be interesting to read an article on how public schools are planning to anticipate this shift in importance from test scores to essay writing...