My Calling Is Profiler [EN]: Chapter 588

Mountains aren’t exactly tourist attractions, but dedicated individuals still seek them out for hiking.

“That’s right. That’s what I heard.”

“Frankly, finding the culprit here seems impossible.”

“You think so too?”

“However, we might be able to deduce something from a different angle.”

“Deduce?”

“Every crime has a motive. The challenge is figuring out how they intended to profit from it.”

Park Do-joon shrugged and headed for the coffee shop.

“Let’s talk over coffee. They only have instant coffee inside.”

Park Do-joon, who preferred iced Americanos, wasn’t a fan of instant coffee. Of course, there was a coffee shop inside the hotel, but they had rented the entire place. Naturally, that coffee shop was also under their control, and without an owner present, he couldn’t just make coffee there.

“Capsule coffee is a little different, though.”

Park Do-joon placed his iced Americano on the table and grinned.

“You don’t have time to relax.”

“I know. But we have time for a cup of coffee.”

The two men looked displeased.

Park Do-joon confidently accepted the coffee and said, “So, the college entrance exam questions were leaked, right?”

“Right.”

“Then how would they sell them?”

“They’d sell them for a high price, of course.”

“But how exactly?”

“There must be someone willing to pay a high price, right?”

Park Do-joon shook his head.

“There won’t be.”

“What? Why not?”

“First, if someone has enough money to pay hundreds of millions [of Korean won, roughly equivalent to hundreds of thousands of US dollars] for that, they can get in through donations.”

“You can’t buy scores on the college entrance exam with money.”

Park Do-joon shook his head again.

‘Those NIS [National Intelligence Service] guys are always like this.’

It’s good to be persistent and dig into one thing. But they often make mistakes and fail to see the bigger picture.

They need to be able to see the big picture, but they can’t, which is why people say the NIS’s skills are a bit behind those of foreign intelligence agencies.

“The problem for us is the college entrance exam. But what parents really want is admission.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Not at all. Admission and the college entrance exam are completely different. Or, to be precise, the college entrance exam is a part of the overall admission process.”

“A part?”

“The goal of admission is to get into college. But the truth is, there are other ways to get into college besides the college entrance exam.”

In college admissions, the college entrance exam is now just one means, not the only one.

“There’s early admission, regular admission, and special admission.”

In fact, early admission is now more important. Early admission means that if you meet certain academic requirements based on your usual school grades, you can be accepted. Regular admission means going to college based solely on your college entrance exam score.

Special admission means going to college based on talent in a particular area. It could be writing, literature, technology, horseback riding, or yachting, depending on the university.

“There’s even regional equity.”

Seoul is definitely more advantageous in terms of school districts. But that’s also a disadvantage at the same time. If they only selected based on grades, students in disadvantaged school districts wouldn’t even have a chance. So, they also select a certain number of students from the provinces for regional equity [a system designed to ensure fair representation from different regions].

“Is it that complicated?”

“Since you both seem to be unmarried, you probably don’t know.”

The two men’s eyes widened.

“Is it simply because we don’t have rings?”

“No, the absence of a ring isn’t proof of being unmarried. Rather, people in dangerous jobs probably don’t wear rings.”

Many people don’t wear rings during work hours for fear that their families might be in danger if their marital status is revealed.

“Then how did you know?”

“You two must be White agents [NIS agents whose identities are not completely hidden]. And White agents usually let their families know about their work.”

Not all NIS agents are Black agents, meaning they hide their identities. The number of such agents is actually very small.

“But that doesn’t mean you can erase the ring mark.”

Even if you take off the ring, there should be a mark indicating that you wore it, but the absence of such a mark means you’ve never worn a ring.

“Are you Holmes?”

“Hahaha, not wrong. After all, the novel ‘Sherlock Holmes’ was the first to introduce the combination of modern forensic science and profiling to the public.”

Park Do-joon shrugged.

“However, modern profiling analyzes things a bit more deeply than that. For example…….”

“For example?”

“The person who did this doesn’t intend to sell it, or something like that.”

“What?”

“These guys aren’t stupid. As you know, they’ve been preparing for a very long time.”

How they prepared and who they recruited is unknown. But at the very least, it had to be decided three months before the entrance exam. Otherwise, there’s no way to contact them.

“And as I said before, the college entrance exam is now just one method of admission. But if you have money, you can go through early admission comfortably, so there’s no reason to risk spending hundreds of millions to buy the questions.”

Is early admission fair? No. Surprisingly, early admission isn’t fair either.

“You’re saying early admission isn’t fair? Isn’t it about competing with your usual skills?”

“You really don’t know about college admissions. The more widespread the Korean private education market [hagwons], the more intense the competition becomes. In fact, the only real solution in Korea right now is to ban private education altogether.”

In the past, they said that if you were good at jump rope, you could go to college through special admission, so when the special admission system was created, jump rope academies sprang up in Gangnam [a wealthy district in Seoul known for its intense focus on education]. When regional equity was created, they simply moved their children’s addresses to the countryside, then sent them to study abroad there while tutoring them.

In fact, if your skills were at a 3rd-grade level in Seoul, you could get a 1st-grade GPA in the provinces, and if you tutored them on top of that, it wasn’t impossible to get into Korea University, which is considered one of the best universities in Korea, even with ‘In Seoul’ skills [meaning skills that would only be considered average in Seoul’s competitive environment].

“Recently, a teacher at a school bullied a student council president to death. Why did they do that?”

“Well? I don’t know that case very well…….”

“Originally, the student council president position was supposed to be for the child of a high-ranking official.”

Being a student council president gives you a huge advantage in college admissions. So, they had designated the child of a high-ranking official, but a random student was elected in the vote. So, the teachers bullied the student so relentlessly that they committed suicide.

“What’s worse, that happened in middle school.”

They were so determined to manipulate grades that they drove a student to suicide in middle school, not even high school, where college admissions officially begin.

“But, if you do that, you can get into college without spending a lot of money.”

If you give money to the teacher, they’ll make you the student council president and manipulate your grades, so what’s there to worry about?

“Rather, considering the risk, there’s no reason to do that.”

They’ve already maxed out their GPA with money and manipulated special admissions.

“In that situation, there’s no reason to manipulate it dangerously.”

If they slip up, all of that will disappear, so why would they buy the exam questions for hundreds of millions?

“Then you can lower the price and sell it to the public, right?”

“That’s right. But where would the distribution network come from?”

“What?”

“A college entrance exam question paper is something that doesn’t have a distribution network.”

There can’t be a distribution network in the first place. If you can’t sell it to a small number of people for hundreds of millions, selling it to a large number of people for tens of millions is also profitable.

“But it’s that much more dangerous.”

You have to find people who want to buy it through the internet. But if that gets out, the police will come right away.

“Wouldn’t at least one person who happens to see it report it?”

One or two people will definitely do it. It doesn’t cost money to report it.

“And to leak the college entrance exam questions for just one person? That’s also inefficient.”

Even if they’re rich, it’s not okay to leak it for just one person. If someone whose mock exam scores are at the bottom gets a perfect score on the college entrance exam, it will obviously be a problem.

Even if they get some questions wrong vaguely, if their grades suddenly skyrocket on their own, who wouldn’t be suspicious?

“How much money can you make by doing that?”

At most, hundreds of millions to billions [of Korean won]. But if they get caught, the punishment will be severe.

“Even if you leave out murder.”

It’s something that will turn the country upside down, and in that case, the punishment will inevitably be the maximum sentence.

“The key to crime is utility. No matter how profitable it is, if the possibility of arrest and the consequences are considered to be a loss, they won’t commit the crime.”

The NIS agents tilted their heads.

“Then could it be that an individual committed this?”

“That’s impossible.”

There’s no reason for an individual to commit it. No matter who inside helped them, they wouldn’t help just because an individual asked them to.

“They must have given them a considerable amount of money.”

They have to give money and make a profit from it.

“Considering these various factors, the culprit can be seen as a group that can profit from it or a group that is strongly influenced by the college entrance exam.”

The NIS agents tilted their heads. There are many such groups.

“Almost every school and student will be affected by that, right?”

“Of course. But that’s a completely different issue from trying to profit. Schools have no reason to do that.”

Because it’s not a place where they can make a profit.

“What about making their school a prestigious high school?”

“That’s also meaningless.”

In order to make a school a prestigious high school, they have to raise the college entrance exam scores and increase the admission rate to prestigious universities like Korea University, but realistically, they won’t become a prestigious high school just by raising it once in a while.

“Furthermore, it’s a headache if the students who took the college entrance exam questions and remembered them leak them somewhere.”

In fact, that happens more often than you think.

“And considering those points, the most likely place is a cram school.”

“A cram school?”

“To be exact, a prestigious cram school.”

“Why there?”

“I was there with the exam question writers and overheard this and that. And what they were worried about was none other than the exam trend.”

“Exam trend?”

“Yes.”

How the questions will be asked is very important.

“I said earlier, right? Teachers who have written the college entrance exam several times and know the exam trend roughly receive hundreds of millions and go to cram schools.”

“Certainly…….”

“And the exam trend is unavoidable no matter what.”

When writing questions on the college entrance exam, they try their best to avoid the same questions, but they can’t completely avoid similar questions.

Almost all types of questions have already been asked.

“Matching the exam trend is the part that private cram schools care about the most.”

The better they match it, the more famous the private cram school becomes, and the more money they make. It’s not that they have so much money that they scout and bring in college entrance exam writers.

“There are many problems with the college entrance exam right now.”

For example, politicians say that it’s not normal for college entrance exam questions to be in textbooks, but the problem is that there are many of these textbooks.”