By Kwon Mee-yoo
Staff Reporter

Korean students will have to deal with tougher administration of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) starting in May, after a series of irregularities involving the leaking of questions occurred here earlier this year.

The Educational Testing Service (ETS), the United States-based organizer of the test, said Sunday that applicants from Korea, Thailand and Vietnam will be barred from using any kind of electronic devices, including mobile phones at examination sites from next month.

Also they will not be able to change the type of test or their exam site on the day of the test.

The test organizer also decided to separate applicants who are over 22 years old, regarding them as adult applicants; and only passports will be accepted as identification for those who take tests outside their homeland.

The reinforcement of test management came after Korean SAT lecturers were apprehended for leaking test questions.

According to police, the lecturers saved the questions using scientific calculators with storage functions, or by cutting out test sheets.

One also took a SAT from Thailand and sent copies of the questions to Korean students in the U.S. who took the same test, capitalizing on the time difference.

Another "star lecturer" was kidnapped and assaulted by a "hagwon owner" to get him to renew his contract. Later, he was also suspected of leaking test questions and plagiarizing practice questions from U.S. test prep books.

A teacher from a high school in Seoul, which is a test center for the SAT, said the ETS notified him that it would now deliver the test packets only in the morning on the test day - previously they had been sent 20 days prior to the day of the test.

This is to prevent teachers at the test center from leaking questions.

"We guarantee a fair and standardized test for students who studied the right way," an ETS representative said.

Composed of critical reading, mathematics and writing sections, the SAT is the equivalent of the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) in Korea.

The test is conducted seven to eight times a year. Some 3 million students apply for the test yearly from around the world.

As many Korean students want to study abroad, private institutions teaching how to obtain good scores on the SAT have prospered in Korea. Some 10,000 Koreans take the test every year.

According to the International Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), the number of Korean students in the U.S. marked 103,889 in 2009, the second-biggest ethnic group following Chinese students at 118,376.