Cell-phone cheating in Korea

This cheating incident looks more like an epidemic and probably has a lot to do with South Korea's high-pressure university entrance exam. "Police questioned 350 South Korean students [last week] and more were under suspicion in a widening probe into cheating that has uncovered a link between two national obsessions - education and mobile phones," Reuters reports, adding that the exam is seen by many young Koreans as the single most important, future-deciding event in their lives. Hundreds of the some 600,000 students who took the exam are alleged to have cheated with their phones (75% of the country's 48 million people have at least one mobile phone, according to Reuters). "Others are being questioned for paying college students to take the exam in their place using forged identification." [For redundancy, here's a link to the same report at CNET.] As for the US, 62% of 12,000 high school students surveyed "admitted to cheating on an exam at least once," according to a Detroit News report on what US educators are doing about it (thanks to TechLearning.com for pointing this story out).