Allocation to High School to Be Withdrawn in Metropolitan Area Protest from Parents

The computer program designed to allocate new students to high schools for the 2002 school year in the 4 leveled high school districts including Suwon, Seongnam, Goyang and Anyang (Gwacheon, Uiwang, Gunpo) districts made a fatal error in processing, and the allocation announced by the Kyonggi Provincial Office of Education on the 8th was fully withdrawn.

Cho Sung-Yun, Superintendent of Kyonggi Provincial Office of Education, said on the 9th, "We withdraw the wrong allocation of students in 4 districts caused by the processing error and will reallocate as soon as possible."

Therefore, the allocation in the 4 districts, except Bucheon district in which the allocation has no fault, among 5 leveled high school districts, which announced the allocation of new students to high schools on the 8th, will be recalled, causing protests by the students` parents and schedule delays for the new semester.

▽ Errors in Processing = The Educational Office was allocating students to high schools according to student numbers in the lottery when the computer made a fatal error during processing for the allocation. Students who had priority were cut and the students who were latter in order were placed in high schools.

After the students and their parents started complaining on the afternoon of the 8th when the result of allocation were announced, the Educational Office investigated and found out errors in computer programming late at night.

Hence, except Bucheon district where the allocation process was completed without errors, existing allocations in the four districts will be nullified and reprocessed.

▽ Cause of the Error = There were no errors in the first stage allocation, but the errors came up during the 2nd stage process where the program matches students` preferred choices with the high schools in the district.

The error produced results where a supposed student who chose school A as his 5th choice was cut from the lottery while the student who chose school A as his 10th choice was allocated to school A.

The Educational Office numbered the students who were allocated to wrong schools due to such errors at 17,000 persons, which is 38 percent out of all 46,503 students to be allocated.

▽ Overall Re-allocation = The error did not affect all allocations, but the Kyonggi Educational Office decided to completely re-allocate as the errors might be successive. The re-allocation results will be completely different from that announced on the 8th.

argus@donga.com