By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
The academic credential forgery scandal has widened to include teachers at hagwon, or Korea's private educational institutes.
The Seoul Central Prosecutors' Office indicted 19 hagwon teachers in Seoul Thursday without physical detention for getting jobs on the strength of counterfeit academic certificates.
The crackdown on teachers at private institutes has come amid a series of bogus diploma scandals that started with former Dongguk University assistant professor and art curator Shin Jeong-ah.
According to the prosecution, some of the teachers obtained graduation certificates from prestigious universities by help of acquaintances and forged them using graphics programs. The others purchased fake certificates from 300,000 to 2 million won through brokers.
Some submitted their falsified diplomas to hagwon they were employed at, while some who operated their own institutes sent in the fabricated documents to district offices before establishing the hagwons, prosecutors said.
Many of the unqualified teachers have lectured at renowned hagwon _ two teachers, with forged diplomas from Seoul National University (SNU) and Yonsei University, respectively, worked at the nation's largest online education company listed on KOSDAQ.
Another instructor with a forged SNU diploma taught at a well-known franchise hagwon, and many others were employed to teach at institutes in regions in southern Seoul where numerous famous hagwon are gathered.
The prosecution said several of them attended the universities but did not graduate, however, most of them had never studied at the prestigious schools they claimed they had attended.
Since July, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education reviewed the diplomas of 48,000 hagwon teachers in Seoul to detect fake ones. It initially planned to investigate instructors who said they graduated from the nation's top three universities _ SNU, Yonsei University and Korea University _ but expanded it to those from all universities.
Prosecutors also indicted 10 people including company workers on charges of purchasing forged college graduation certificates and TOEIC grade sheets through the Internet and using them for employment and promotional purposes.