Cheating

Yes, students do it all over the world. But here, it's very openly accepted and widespread. More often than not, you will give the students a worksheet and the first thing they'll do is try to copy the answers off of the students next to them. The Korean co-teachers don't care one bit whatsoever.

Another example of the lack of discipline or lack of trust in the ability of Korean teachers to be honest is shown when the students take their beginning of semester and end of semester tests. Testing in Korea is important only for the sake of knowing whether or not the teacher actually followed their book script and taught the basic things that the students were supposed to know. This is otherwise known as teaching to the test.

The testing at the beginning and at the end is to show an increase in wrote knowledge, not actual proficiency. It has nothing to do with a students’ ability to go to the next level of school. Therefore, all students are passed to the next level regardless of ability or knowledge. This creates an unbalance in the classrooms which usually have 40 students (general breakdown: 5 students want to learn, 25 understand but don't want to do anything, 10 don't understand much at all and don't ever want to).

This testing is all about judging the Korean teacher's ability to show that their work was actually causing improvement in the students’ knowledge, however small the improvement. So, of course, like most things in Korea, it leaves testing open to corruption. Korea can't trust its own teachers to administer this test; I'd imagine switching the teachers that administer the test for each of the homeroom classes wouldn't work as well, since the school faculty is run like a fraternity/sorority and favoritism/corruption abounds. Therefore, when the teachers administer these tests, they have to get a parent to watch over the testing in the classroom. It's nice to know that there's at least a check and balance for that, they just need a check and balance for everything else.