A fellow in Korea was sentenced to three years in jail for helping people cheat on the TOEIC. His scheme involved taking pictures of his answers during the break following the listening section and sending them out to his clients from a bathroom stall. It is more involved than that, but it involves a very real likelihood of many people cramming themselves into a single bathroom stall and I don’t want to write about it in detail.
Regular readers know that the TOEIC is big business in Korea and Japan (and a few European markets). Indeed, the TOEIC may be the most widely taken standardized English test in the world. I once had a job in Korea where I sat at a desk in Gangnam and wrote TOEIC practice questions for eight hours a day. Every day. For almost a year.
It is worth mentioning that test centers are not quite as secure as they ought to be. When Duolingo or Pearson or someone else convinces governments to accept their at-home tests for immigration purposes, the pitch will be (in part) that their approach is actually MORE secure that traditional test center testing. They will probably be correct in that assertion.