Confusions in Dealing with Same KSAT Grade

Since the distributed grades of the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Test to colleges for the evaluation of the students were provided without details below the decimal point, colleges are struggling with how to deal with the same grades.

The Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development provided the grades that originally had the number to the first decimal place to prevent the line-ups of the applicants by the decimal numbers.

Consequently, some applicants who have a little higher grade of KSAT were rejected from colleges while some lower graders were admitted.

After the release of the admitted student list of Seoul National University last year, many rejected applicants complained about why they were rejected while some students who had lower grade were admitted.

Hanyang University Seoul, which released the accepted student list on Dec 29 last year, had 94 applicants who had the same grade. Particularly, the departments of Natural Science and Engineering that did not have an essay test had 66 students with the same grades.

Consequently, colleges are busy preparing new measures for making clear criteria for admission.

Korea University subdivided the interview grades in 5 levels and lowered the basic grade to 20 out of 100.

Yonsei University counted the grades of student documents and essays to the second decimal place to increase distinction of the evaluation.

Sunggyungwan University also lowered the basic grade to 50 from the previous 70 this year and subdivided the differences between the levels up to 0.1 point variation. Meanwhile, some colleges are planning to admit all students who have the same grade and reduce the quota of the admission next year.

In response, the K-11 students expressed their complaints, "Why should we be the victims of the reduced quota? The individual KSAT grade and the distributed records of the KSAT grade should be the same to avoid the confusion."

Seong-Chul Hong sungchul@donga.com