#20 - Third Thursday in November: College Entrance Examination Day

Published on December 2, 2022

College Entrance Examination Day, Third Thursday in November.

Korea CSAT entrance exam details.

On the third Thursday in November each year in South Korea, the nation holds its collective breath. The stock market opens an hour late, flights are grounded for a portion of the day to reduce noise, and public transportation services are increased to accommodate more than half a million eager high school commuters. Anxious parents and well-wishers gather outside testing centers, while shamans and Buddhist temples report a spike in visitors and donations. This is Korea’s notorious College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT, Taehak suhak nŭngnyŏk sihŏm), colloquially known as Sunŭng, arguably the single-most important day in a Korean’s life that determines more than any other factor future education, career prospects, and marriage potential.

Students must be present in the test-taking facility by 8:10am sharp, after which the exam unfolds over the next nine hours, with breaks in between each test section. The examination consists of six sections: Korean (Kugŏ), mathematics, English, Korean history, subordinate subjects (social studies, sciences, vocational education), and a second foreign language/Chinese characters (Hancha). All sections of the exam are technically optional, but most students sit for all of the sections, except second foreign language/Hancha. The social studies section consists of life and ethics, ethics and ideologies, Korean geography, world geography, East Asian history, world history, law and politics, society and culture, and economics, while the science section consists of Physics 1 and 2, Chemistry 1 and 2, Biology 1 and 2, and Earth Sciences 1 and 2. Candidates choose two subjects each from either Social studies or science, depending on the requirements of the specific universities to which they are applying. Students from special vocational high schools only sit for one subject of the vocational exam, which is made up of agricultural science, industry, commerce, oceanography, and home economics. Students sitting for the second foreign language exam choose one language from a list including German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Hancha and Hanmun. The examinations are graded mainly by various university faculty members, with results published about a month after the date of the exam.

The Sunŭng Exam is developed and managed by the Korean Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE) according to National Curriculum standards of the Republic of Korea. In the post-liberation era individual universities administered their own entrance examinations before the ROK government instituted a national, uniform exam in 1960. Although the modern Sunŭng was instituted at this time, the tradition of conducting a competitive, high-stakes examination to determine access to higher rank and opportunity has a history of nearly a millennium on the Korean peninsula, dating back to the Civil Service Examination (Kwagŏ sihŏm) established during the Koryŏ Dynasty (918-1392) that was continued in some form until its abrogation in 1894 during the final years of the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910). In a strongly Confucian nation, the examination tested knowledge of the Confucian Classics and was thought to represent the most objective and egalitarian measurement of the perfectibility of humans to be moral exemplars, itself a Confucian concept. The ostensibly merit-based examination for selecting government ministers however papered over the inequality in traditional Korean society that prevented the vast majority from accessing education. While in theory the test was open to all Koreans who did not belong to explicitly proscribed groups, in practice very few non-elite students sat for the exam, while fewer still passed. This created an elite power structure in traditional Korea that tended to be more exclusive and resistant to social mobility than that in traditional China, a country that administered a very similar examination regime that indeed served as the model for the Korean system.

Today’s Sunŭng Exam has received criticism for being similarly exclusivist and for perpetuating or even exacerbating socio-economic divisions, despite its pretense toward objectivity. A recent study for example has shown that in the twenty-first century the proportion of high-performing students from Seoul and surrounding areas has greatly increased compared to all other regions. Within Seoul moreover, the vast majority of such students hail from a handful of the most affluent neighborhoods, areas with the highest concentration of supplementary education options, infrastructure, and highly qualified educators.  During the second half of the twentieth century and beyond successive ROK administrations in response to expert consensus and popular demand have constantly retooled the exam regime and its relationship to the education system, attempting to strike the right balance between creating an egalitarian and objective pathway to university without placing undo weight on one assessment or pressure on young students. The government experimented for example with placing more emphasis on high school grade reports and teacher recommendations to balance the weight of admissions criteria, but these methods were perceived to be more susceptible to corruption and bias and hence less objective. Thus, despite the various reform efforts, the basic structure of the Sunŭng Exam has been left intact, and this remains the overwhelming determining factor for university admission and future prospects. This has created a number of recognized social ills, including teen depression and suicide, so-called “exam repeaters” (chaesusaeng) who choose to study another year to retake the exam after underperforming, and periodic cheating scandals that erupt in the media.

For all of the controversy surrounding the exams, the negative side-effects, and the recognized need for reform, benefits of the system have been acknowledged. The examinations promote a culture of diligence and high scholastic performance by world standards. Teachers in the Republic of Korea are well-paid, highly respected and qualified, and regularly rotated within a district to promote uniformity in education standards. The centralized nature of the curriculum moreover ensures unity in knowledge attainment across various groups and regions and a sense of national identity. Despite the flaws of the examination system, a more objective measure of unified knowledge attainment has not yet been devised, and so the Sunŭng Exam will remain dominant for the foreseeable future. This one day in late November which echoes nearly a millennium of history and tradition will continue to determine the future of millions in South Korea.

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Daniel Pieper ©

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Reference

Young-Chul Kim, Young-joon Kim and Glenn Loury, “Widening Gap in College Admission and Improving Equal Opportunity in South Korea,” Global Economic Review 43, no. 2 (2014): 110-30.