The Korean CSAT: Socio-educational Insanity

Yesterday in Korea approximately 600,000 high school seniors took the college entrance exam. To understand what a phenomenon this is, you have to look at a few facts: The test is held only once a year, and a student's score can affect just about every aspect of his or her future life from which college the student attends, to the availability of jobs, and even to marriage possibilities. Businesses are asked to open two hours late so as to relieve the usual traffic congestion and allow students to arrive on time to the testing facilities. Flights from Gimpo National Airport in Seoul that fly over or near testing sites are cancelled or re-routed to cut down on noise. Police, fire, and medical emergency vehicles are made available to rush late and/or ill students to testing centers. Parents (mostly mothers) by the tens of thousands fill churches and temples to pray for the success of their children. First and second year high school students camp out over night to get prime seats outside testing sites, so they can cheer the seniors from their schools going in for the test. While all this is certainly fascinating to witness, there is a dark side to the system here.

Why is the test so important? It's fairly simple. There are three or four "top" universities in Korea; Yonsei, Seoul National University, and Korea University being the ones I can think of. Companies in Korea routinely ignore applicants from "second tier" universities and choose graduates from "top" schools regardless of ability. I teach at Chungnam National University in Daejeon, which is considered to be one of the better state run schools in the country and certainly the best school in Daejeon. However, when I talk to my students about their job prospects upon graduation, they are fairly pessimistic because CNU is not one of the "elite" schools. Why did my students choose CNU? They didn't. Their test scores made the choice for them. Thus, the score a student receives on the CSAT directly affects the university they attend and therefore their future employment possibilities. The ripple effect goes from there.

The pressures placed on high school seniors in this country by the sheer importance of this test are astronomical. High school seniors start studying for the test basically from the time they enter high school. This means that your average Korean high school student studies between 14 and 20 hours a day. This includes regular school hours, cram schools (hagwons), private tutors, and after school, mandatory study sessions. They go to school on Sunday for heaven's sake! I taught high school students at an English hagwon for the first three years I was here, and these poor kids would drag themselves into my 5:00 pm class hollow-eyed and exhausted. I gave them extra credit if they managed to stay awake throughout the class let alone participate and actually learn something. The thing is, most of them had two or three other hagwons to go to after my class.

Pressure is so high that, according to an article in today's print edition of the Korea Herald, parents by the hundreds are moving their families overseas to avoid subjecting their children to the CSAT. Why? Again the answer is fairly simple. Every year a number of students commit suicide due to real or perceived failure on the CSAT. This testing season is no different. In the first reported case this year, a student who was going to take the test for the second time threw himself out of his apartment building the day before the test (www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2005/11/24/200511240032.asp). I have no actual stats on how many students kill themselves as a result of this test, but there were at least five last year that I do know about. The unfortunate thing is that the student mentioned above is, in all probability, only the first this year.

While calls for testing and university admissions standards reform in Korea are becoming louder and more strident, I wonder how many children have to die before something actually gets done.