By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
Lee Ji-young, vibrant radio presenter who attracted an audience of tens of thousands to learn English with pop songs, was revealed to have faked her diplomas, astonishing many people who were already flabbergasted with a previous forged degree scandal. The instructor admitted her wrongdoings and apologized, saying that she would resign from all of her positions.
Lee had said she went to Britain and graduated from University of Brighton, earning a master's degree from the same school in 1996.
In fact she graduated from elementary, middle and high school in Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province, but after failing a university entrance exam, went to Britain to take an English language course for a year in Hove, a small coastal town, and then a local educational institution for another year in Brighton.
After returning to Korea, she labeled herself as the holder of a British university's master's degree and found work at Yonsei University foreign language institute and Lee Ik-hoon Language Institute before landing a job as a radio presenter in 2000.
Lee has worked for the state-run radio KBS English educational program ``Good Morning Pops'' for seven years. The program that encourages learning useful English expressions through pop song lyrics, was one of the most popular on radio and Lee was awarded Best Radio Master of Ceremonies in 2004.
She is said to have talent for her work, and her classes at English institutes were always full of students. Her articles on the program's message board always had more than 20,000 viewers' hits.
She has written two English textbooks where she introduced herself as a graduate of the University of Brighton.
Lee said that her family was in debt and when one of her acquaintances who thought she had a degree offered her a job, she couldn't tell the truth and accepted it, that kept on till this day.
After the news broke, the KBS apologized for not having examined her qualifications during the seven years she worked there. The director of the program said that at the time of initial hiring, Lee was just a fill-in for another presenter who quit on short notice and they required Lee's resume, but did not examine its authenticity.
Although she is to resign, her lies scarred many fans who loved her easy and colorful method of instruction. Some even said that school names do not matter and that Lee is another victim of society's craving for superficial academia.
Still most people criticized Lee for lying in public for so long and that she should be banished from the English teaching field.
The news came after the shock of Shin Jeong-ah, assistant art professor of Dongguk University and dismissed art director of Gwangju Biennale 2008, who fabricated her academic record, including a bachelors and masters degree from the University of Kansas and a doctorate from Yale University.
The news of the ``Art Cinderella'' duping people and a star English instructor's fake academic records is raising suspicions that there may be lot more fraudulent cases here.
Lee Hyun-se, the nation's top cartoonist and a professor of Sejong University animation department, confessed earlier that he once told people that he was a university dropout when he was just a high school graduate.
He said that he could not bear other people looking down on him just because he was a cartoonist and ill educated, and that he came up with the lie. But he said that he wrote his exact academic record during the professor recruitment process and there was nothing wrong with his teaching.