The Chungcheongnam-do Department of Education will be taking a look at the degrees of every hagwon teacher in the province (or at least those hagwon registered with local education departments) in an effort to crack down on teachers with forged degrees. The degrees of 6.117 teachers teaching at 3,482 hagwon will be investigated.
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22 Comments
Why all this emphasis on “legitimate” degrees, it’s not as if the legitimate ones are hard to come by!
If you can fog a mirror, you get a degree!(Ouch!, that comment hurt!)
That’s funny, after they’ve run all the stories about Koreans with fake diplomas, now they’ve got to blame the foreigners for something too. I bet there are proportionately less fake degrees among hakwon teachers than among Koreans in general.
#2, My wife was telling about the many Korean entertainers who led people to believe that they had graduated from UC Berkeley when in fact they had registered for a semester at Berklee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.....e_of_Music
Even a lot of the real ones are fake. Have come across a lot of people here who have degrees from overseas universities, yet can’t seem to be able to string an English sentence. Maybe this is why:
Foreign students in plagiarism scandal
Full-fee-paying international students have been caught cheating in their masters courses in a plagiarism scandal at the University of New England (UNE).
The university on Wednesday said an audit of 210 students enrolled in one subject in two postgraduate courses between 2004 and 2006 had uncovered substantial evidence of cheating.
Students proven to have plagiarised material could be stripped of their degrees.
“Of the 210 theses involved in the unit under review, a significant proportion are alleged to be plagiarised,” the university said in a statement.
“The university takes any allegation of plagiarism very seriously, and, where appropriate, may seek the rescission of awards by the University Council.”
A student raised the alarm in November 2006, warning university management of suspected plagiarism and prompting an investigation.
UNE vice chancellor Alan Pettigrew said the university would not hesitate to penalise students found to have cheated.
“The issue of plagiarism is a difficult one for all universities,” Professor Pettigrew said.
“The university will not shy away from the application of penalties, if necessary, to protect its academic integrity.”
The theses were by full-fee-paying international students reportedly enrolled in an information technology course delivered externally by a commercial partner of UNE.
Citing privacy reasons, UNE refused to name the students or the commercial partner that delivered the course.
Foreign students are more likely to plagiarise material because they may not be familiar with academic standards required by Australian universities, the students’ union says.
The National Union of Students described the issue as “definitely disturbing”, but said universities could do more to prevent plagiarism by ensuring international students understood Australian referencing requirements.
“There’s generally a high incidence of international student plagiarism because of different academic requirements they encounter when they come to Australia,” said NUS president Michael Nguyen.
“There are different referencing standards across the world. That’s probably an issue that needs to be looked at.
“They’re probably not aware of the academic requirements for Australian universities.”
Mr Nguyen said some international students had inadequate English ability and did not receive enough guidance with skills such as essay writing.
Simply stripping the UNE students of their degrees would not solve the problem.
“It’s probably not really addressing the systemic problem,” he said.
“Clearly, it’s something systemic that’s happening and it needs to be addressed by policy changes within the university … to ensure students are adequately prepared and have enough support.”
PS. Not to say that Berklee isn’t a good school, of course. I’ve read that Branford Marsalis, for example, is one of their alumni.
They’re not. The investigation applies to both Koreans and foreigners. In fact, I believe most of the people who’ll be getting investigated are Koreans.
There’s a crackdown on foreigners currently happening down here in Gwangju. The majority of the people I know have had their hagwons spot-checked; dozens of people have been deported. Apparently (or so the rumour goes, filtered through the police to hagwon directors, to teachers) someone has decided to open a new police station with (estimates vary, but some say 70 cops), and they’re specifically targetting foreigners. God only knows what that makes the cop-to-foreigner ratio compared to the cop-to-korean ratio, but it strikes me as more than a little odd.
Anyone else have any info on this?
See, hoju-saram, there you go scare-mongering again. Deported? They haven’t been deported — they’re all here:
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=102
“Someguy” Berkley is way over-rated. They seem to make big money by taking in loads of Asian students. I heard this one Japanese drummer who supposedly graduated from Berkley and he was unbelievably weak.
Now, if I hear so-and-so went there as a recommendation, I just grimace.
Is a degree required only for teaching English, or is it require for any job in a hagwon?
crikey, it certainly looks like some sort of re-education camp, you can tell by the frozen smiles.
*shudders*
About that crackdown in Gwangju — it appears it began last month with about 30 people, including 17 foreign teachers, getting busted. The teachers included four Americans, four Canadians, three Kenyans and three South Africans.
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=102
And if the long-suffering citizens of Gwangju didn’t have enough to endure, this was followed up by revelations that the local chapter of the national hairdressers’ association was taking bribes to certify unqualified hairdressers:
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=102
They apparently also went around to, ahem, “barbershops of ill-repute” offering “protection” if the joined the association (and paid their fees).
It’s a sad world we live in when you have to wonder whether the Canadian teaching your children English has an actual degree, or whether the ajummah giving you a handjob is actually a qualified hair technician…
Man, this looking at the fine grade of crumbs in the rug of education is pretty funny. This country is full of posers some with fake degrees and some not.
I hope that at point along this strange path, someone will get the idea that an over-emphasis of education and institutional credentials is not a good way to determine character or ability.
It’s along the lines of “white people are better English speakers” that hagwons
used tocling to so much.lol, amen to that.
Personally, I don’t condone illegal teaching, so I’ve decided to take a break from it for a few weeks.
Besides, who cares about police harrassment when we’ve got a shiny - nay, a “sparkling” new museum to enjoy, just for us.
(On a side note, by my estimates, about 8 of the 17 who were busted were black. Odd, considering 90% {at a guess} of teachers around these parts, illegal or not, are white…)
I dare say they’re investigating all teachers, but only the foreigners with faked degrees get the immediate chop.
Half the netizen responses to stories about Koreans with fake degrees are along the lines of “so what? give ‘em a break.”
That’s because the slight ebb of rebellion against the-education-until-you-drop fever is just a glint in a young Korean’s eye at this moment.
[Foreigners... are a different matter. They all come from rich English speaking countries and have had the world handed to them on a silver platter, THEN they come here and steal our women and abuse kids and treat Koreans like shit while not having to really bust their ass for anything. Round them all up and let immigration sort them to the airports. The less of that dead weight, the better.]
I’m curious… How can the Chungcheongnam-do Department of Education even verify if a degree is legitimate or not? For example, if they were to check my degree, would they be calling the Hawaii-Pacific University offices in Honolulu to ascertain whether or not I actually attended school and graduated from there?
Are teachers required to bring their actual degrees to Korea for inspection? Even so, with the printing capabilities these days the only way to actually verify the legitimacy of any degree is to directly call the university. I can’t imagine the Chungcheongnam-do having the money and resources to do this. About the only thing they can do is weed out the Canadian degrees drawn up in crayon. Ho ho. j/k.
Maekchu, I am told by a reliable source that people here want to see the actual sheepskin. I guess that is cheaper than making a call.
This surge will only push the miscreants into other provinces.
Funnily enough some of the best teachers I knew over there were those with fake degrees - and I met plenty of folks with legitimate MAs who couldn’t teach worth a damn as well. I always got the feeling that the government were just making sure that, at the very least, the teacher had to demonstrate the stick-to-itiveness to get a degree properly (not that getting a scrubby BS is really that hard) or the resourcefulness to get a bulletproof fake one. That said, my first job there (along with most of the teachers I met) was at a small hagwon where the owner certainly bribed the immigration official, and once you’re in, they don’t often check again. I did have to tote my degree around with me at interview times though, the hagwon directors really wanted to see the actual document.
Who would have thought that nice Kenyan man at the local Ding Daeng Dong was uncredentialed?
You know, this is like going into the kitchen of your favorite restaurant and seeing how your food is actually prepared. Sometimes, you’re just better off not knowing.
“This surge will only push the miscreants into other provinces.”
Probably. Also, Chungnam hagwons will have a much harder time finding anybody to teach. But soon the crack down will end. And they’ll resume hiring any foreigner - preferably white and North American, but beggars can’t always be choosers - with a pulse. And soon enough we’ll be right back where we started.