More than 300 cases highlighting irregularities at private education businesses have been reported to the government in the past two weeks after President Yoon Suk Yeol vowed to weed out academy “cartels.”

Officials at the Ministry of Education told the press on Friday that a total of 325 reports have been filed with the ministry from June 22 to Thursday accusing private academies, known as hagwon in Korea, of corruption.

The ministry had set a so-called “intensive reporting period” encouraging members of the public to offer any tip-offs about fraudulent conduct in the hagwon industry.

Among the 325 cases filed, at least four have been referred to investigative authorities for a formal probe, the ministry said.

Vice Education Minister Jang Sang-yoon said during Friday’s briefing that an instructor at a large hagwon offered money to public school teachers who formerly wrote exam questions for the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) and had them come up with questions they thought might be on future CSATs.

The instructor was said to have made workbooks out of those questions and sold them to students.

Many other cases were referred to the Fair Trade Commission.

Among them are allegations that private academies coerced students to purchase copious amounts of supplementary learning materials and workbooks to increase profit, or exaggerated former students’ CSAT test results to attract more students.

Education officials said more cases could be referred to investigative authorities or the Fair Trade Commission, noting that 63 cases are still being reviewed by the ministry.

Reports about potential corruption at hagwon businesses will be continuously received via a complaint center, the ministry stressed.

“The unlawful and unfair cartels and misconduct that are being identified in private education businesses represent essential societal issues that ought to be addressed to establish fairness and common sense in the education sector,” Jang said.

The government “will devise improvement measures for issues requiring institutional reforms in the upcoming months, such as the practice of coercive selling and excessive collection of tuition fees,” the vice minister continued.

The government’s crackdown on private academies comes after Yoon ordered Education Minister Lee Ju-ho last month to exclude any material that is not covered in public education from the annual state-administered CSAT.

Yoon’s order came just five months before the annual CSAT, which vitally determines Korean students’ college admissions.

On Friday, the police revealed they were investigating operators of a chatroom on the encrypted messaging service Telegram on charges of copyright infringement. The suspects allegedly distributed expensive workbooks authored by renowned hagwon instructors free of charge.

The chatroom had 138,000 members as of Monday before shutting down Tuesday.

BY LEE SUNG-EUN, CHOI MIN-JI [lee.sungeun@joongang.co.kr]