More revelations about Hacker's Education Group

In the first decade of the new millennium, Hacker's Education Group experienced phenomenal growth and became a big player in the private TOEFL test preparation industry in South Korea.  In an earlier post, I noted the indictment of Hacker's Education Group for illegally obtaining TOEIC questions.  Today the Korea Joongang Daily carried an article reporting that the founder of Hacker's Education Group, David Cho, was also an English professor at Chungnam National University, under his Korean name.
English testing and test preparation in South Korea are big business.  About that there is no question.   It seems the question that needs to be addressed is how to protect the integrity and confidentiality of high-stakes academic testing so that the institutions around the world who use test scores can have a degree of confidence in the results.

Ministry considers re-naming Korea's new English test

The Korea Herald notes that the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology is considering re-naming the forthcoming NEAT (National English Ability Test) test. An official told The Korea Herald that the ministry is searching separate names for the two versions of the National English Ability Test currently being trialed.
“The word ‘National’ doesn’t fit in our long-term plan to export the testing tool to other countries where English is not spoken as the mother tongue,” he said, adding that the ministry plans to export the adult version of NEAT.
NEAT is being developed by the ministry largely to replace the English test part of the current state-administered college entrance exam. The new test will place more focus on speaking and writing skills rather than reading comprehension and grammar. NEAT consists of three levels, with level one for adults and level two and three for minors.

Another international school to open in Seoul

Part of Korea's response to the growing outflow of students for K-12 or so-called "early education" has been to seek establishment of more high quality international schools here in South Korea.  The latest announcement, as reported in The Wall Street Journal and other media, is that the Dwight Family of Schools will open a branch in Seoul, at the invitation of the Seoul Metropolitan Government.  The Dwight School, which has a flagship campus on the upper west side of Manhattan, was reportedly chosen after visits to more than 100 prestigious IB institutions around the world.  It is to be an IB model for the South Korean educational system and the anchor school in Seoul's new Digital Media City.