[Opinion] College Entrance Competition and the Southern Region of Han River

The Korea Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE) geared up the difficulty level of the 2001 College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) compared to previous tests. After the November test was over, the score results turned out terrible; the average score for the top 50 percent of the students’ points crashed over 60 points. The following spring, the real estate market was skyrocketing in the Gangnam area (southern region of Han River, the yolk of Seoul in business, education, and culture). The exodus of parents who want to send their children to schools in Gangnam increased the housing prices. Their move was not an accidental occurrence. The education surroundings in Gangnam had been known as the best of the best for a long time, and the difficult CSAT of 2001 only provided a good momentum for those parents to move.

Just as Mencius’s mother showed great zeal in her son’s good education, all parents have an aspiration of affording to send their children to a school in an area with quality educational conditions. With Gangnam having academically stronger students than the rest of Seoul, it brought a synergistic effect as the academic performance of the students residing in Gangnam substantively increased. Parents and students, who had high aspirations for education, rushed to the area from different regions, and private academic institutions in the region sprouted. Recently, many local governments are making efforts to furnish good education surroundings targeting their locals to have better satisfaction with their quality of lives, which is very constructive. The local governments should make each of its “districts of education specialty” like Gangnam. This could genuinely be called the “balanced national development.”

With the introduction of the new college entrance system, the attention is now focused on secondhand impacts of the real estate market in Gangnam and the possible changes to its educational conditions. The success and failure in college entrance competition wholly depend on the applicants’ subtle gap of score points. Many students fail in gaining admission from their dream school because of their lower score in a literal decimal points gap from their competitors. The new college entrance system is disadvantageous for the students in Gangnam because for them, it is very difficult to get higher scores in the relative evaluation system, which ranks students based on their test scores within the school group. On the other hand, the rest of the areas find the new college entrance system relatively advantageous to them. The new system will definitely impact house prices in Gangnam. In many ways, the new college entrance system seems to be targeting the Gangnam area.

What matters most is the Roh administration’s perspective of education. They have made the CSAT useless, which was one of the most credible barometers for colleges to screen applicants, and stifled individual colleges in making its own academic test to examine applicants. It is their strong will being expressed in their planning to have a control policy of education under the cause of the principle of equity. Even the socialist country of China emphasizes autonomy and competition in educational policies. It is hard to understand this belated control policy in education; is this for whom and for what? Education is the process of inducing one’s latent potentials as much as possible. This is possible only when the autonomy of education is guaranteed. It is perilous for the government to stand in the control policy line in education, which can devastate the overall education in Korea. Beyond the controversial issues in Gangnam, I really worry about the gloomy future ahead of us.

Editorial Writer: Hong Chan-sik chansik@donga.com