By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter

A star lecturer teaching students wanting to take the U.S. Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was banned Wednesday from leaving the country in connection with the ongoing police investigation into a widening scandal over the leaks of the test questions.

The Suseo Police Station in southern Seoul said it had found proof that Jeffrey Sohn, a Korean national, had leaked SAT questions.

Sohn, who had worked at the Recas Academy in Gangnam, a private institute specializing in standardized tests required for U.S. universities, is suspected of obstructing the business of the test organizer, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), police said.

However, the U.S-based test provider has not filed a complaint against any of the lecturers involved in the recent scandal, only saying that there are no immediate plans to change its test security system.

Popular SAT lecturers are able to earn big paychecks. Sohn, who was teaching English composition for the SAT, was once kidnapped, taken to a villa in Gyeonggi Province and beaten up by his employer last December after he attempted to leave the academy.

Police said the 39-year-old lecturer opened an online community just for students preparing to enter U.S. universities and posted SAT questions after he himself took the tests. He is reputed for picking the right questions for students, who subsequently score well on the SAT.

Police suspect that Sohn acquired SAT questions and offered them to Korean students before they took the test.

Sohn was working with another lecturer, identified by his surname, Kim, at the Recas Academy.

Kim also was booked last month for obstructing ETS business by leaking test questions. He is suspected of securing questions used in Thailand and transferring them together with answers to his students, who were about to take tests in the U.S., taking advantage of the time difference.

The ETS, which has experienced several cases of cheating before, operates the college admission tests in Korea at 22 venues, seven times a year

Last May, a college student who took the exam at a foreign school in Seoul was caught smuggling out test sheets.

ETS once canceled the scores of some 900 Korean students at nine test venues in Korea as exam questions were leaked to a hagwon in the affluent Gangnam district in January 2007.

kswho@koreatimes.co.kr