An Exploratory Study to Establish a Severity Classification Scheme for College Admission Fraud

There is a lack of pedagogical concepts and academic discussion of the conceptual framework needed to monitor college admissions fraud systematically.Therefore, this study attempted to analyze the scope and level of college entrance examination fraud from different perspectives and positions and tried to systematically categorize the cases according to the severity of their contents.The scope of the research data was 119 cases, including college audit reports published by the Ministry of Education and court cases related to college entrance examination fraud from 2011 to 2021.In the exploratory analysis, four experts in education and law analyzed the severity of fraud through the content analysis of each case, and a total of nine experts, including admission experts, parents, teachers, and college admission officials, participated in the subsequent confirmatory analysis to verify the reliability of the content on the severity of fraud.The current study found that individual professors, admission officers, and admission directors violated their obligations to avoid faculty members or interfered with practical tests or interviews, which is identified as the most serious type of college admission fraud.In addition, other types of institutional admission fraud were identified as occurring because of organizational culture.This study examined the issue of improving fairness in college admissions from a new perspective.It provided a framework for categorizing cases typically discussed from an ethical and moral perspective.The results of the current study have implications for future policy implementation to ensure fairness in the admissions system, as they can be used as a basis for objective judgment of the seriousness of cases of college admissions fraud.