A high school faculty member has been sentenced to three years in prison for leaking the US Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) papers, judicial sources said Friday.

According to the sources, the Seoul Central District Court handed down a three-year prison term to the 38-year-old US citizen, surnamed Lee, on charges of obstruction of business.

Lee began to work at a high school in Yongin, about 50 kilometers south of Seoul, in 2009 and became its SAT coordinator in 2013.

In mid-2017, a broker approached the defendant and offered to pay if Lee leaked SAT papers.

The investigation found Lee took pictures of the test papers and handed them to Kim on 10 occasions over 18 months.

The broker let SAT instructors solve the questions and then sold them to students in Europe who took the same tests a few hours later due to the time difference.

Some of the students were reportedly accepted to prestigious US universities.

Lee was found to have made around 203 million won ($181,740) from the crime.

"The defendant caused severe damage to society by not simply obstructing the work of the SAT administrator but fundamentally undermining the fairness in the admissions process to US universities, which many students around the world apply for," the court said,

"The nature of his crime is even worse in that illegal black markets for exam papers cannot be eradicated due to the existence of the leak of test papers like this case," the court added. (Yonhap)