Seoul National University (SNU) has made public its new ideas on entrance procedures. High school performance will be given the same weight as it has been, but much more importance will be placed on an essay-writing section that will be in a format that is unique to SNU. Reportedly the school has only decided the larger framework of what it wants to do with its entrance procedures in the future, but that framework itself is cause for considerable concern.
The reaction to the idea of an essay-writing section designed uniquely by SNU is that it would be a return to the old system of allowing each university to design its own entrance test. School administration officials say it will not be a test with concrete questions about Korean, English, and mathematics and will instead be a test of creativity and thinking ability, but one wonders how substantially different that will be from university-specific entrance tests. Private tutoring for university entrance essay examinations is already all the rage; dividing SNU's school-specific writing section could increase the burden of private tutoring for high school students.
Another problem is how SNU is not increasing the importance given to high school performance, in opposition to the government's position. The government wants to make high school performance worth more in university entrance in order to bring more normality to high school education, so the country cannot be having SNU, a national university, be going directly against that. The government's plan may not be the absolutely best option for normalizing high school education, but resisting that head-on is not that different from the selfish approach of some of the private universities that are trying to use a less-than-straightforward means of rating high schools in order to select superior students. The criticism that the idea is to remove students with good grades from the equation by making things advantageous for special purpose high schools and students from Gangnam is not unreasonable.
Some argue that universities should be guaranteed the right to admit new students the way they want, but in SNU's case leaving everything for SNU to decide would be problematic, because its new proposal will heavily influence the whole of both Korean university and high school education. Furthermore, SNU receives more state and social support than any other university and therefore should demonstrate that it accepts commensurate social responsibility. It should form a framework for social discussion such as an "educational development council" composed of education officials, civic groups, parents, and others to find a desirable proposal which SNU should then accept.
The Hankyoreh, 2 May 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
SNU's Problematic Entrance Procedure Proposal |
