“Excellent” for the First Place Student and Same Goes for the 88th

Last year, 88 second-year students from a total of 173 second-year students at Seoul’s A High School received an “excellent” rating on their report cards in their absolute evaluation. Ms. Kim of Gangwon’s B High School received an “excellent” in Composition where she topped the school and also another “excellent” in Mathematics II, in which she was ranked 72nd in school.

Because these examples illustrate that school report card inflation still exists while there are also differing levels of scholastic abilities in different regions and schools, it is said to be unreasonable to condemn the universities alone regarding the high school ranking system.

The claim by Kim Wan-jin, Seoul National University’s admission’s office head, on October 7 is in the same context, saying that methods to measure different scholastic abilities for college entrance should be developed and that the main exam system should be partially adopted.

School Report Inflation—

Last year, a teacher in Gyeonggi’s B High School gave exam answer sheets back to the students after foreseeing average grades that were too low on a mock marking, and had students fix answers collectively.

“This is nonsense, but what can I say when this helps my kid get into a good college,” a parent remarked.

Ms. Kim, 17, transferred to a school in Gangnam late last year from a school in Gangbuk. At her old school, she maintained her scores within the top five percent of her class, but now she is within the 20th percentile at her current school.

She said, “Before, I always got a perfect score, and I didn’t have to study for a test. But now, I have to study with the Basic Jongsok workbook, Advanced Jongsok workbook, plus a problem bank from a private after-school academy, and then I can get 90 percent.”

She also said, “At my old school, if you carry Jongsok around, my friends would ask, ‘you even study with Jongsok?’ But now, however difficult the problem is, there always is a perfect score.”

A teacher in Gangbuk’s C High School said, “It is a skilled teacher’s know-how to set the average score as 89 on every test,” adding, “If we give too difficult exams, parents will criticize, saying ‘Are you okay even when your students can’t go to college?’”

According to state administration inspection documents of the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development, practices of school report inflation recorded 1,311 cases in 491 schools, including leaked exam papers prior to the exams in the last three years.

It is an inevitable reality to see the scholastic ability differences between different schools. “Within Seoul only, there are schools where almost 100 of the students are eligible to go to Seoul National University and schools where barely one student is eligible,” said an admission officer at a university.

Universities Also Have Problems—

First-semester early decision selection is a process for students with talents or with specialty in certain areas.

However, universities are eager to select students with good school records from this point, in fear that all the excellent students might be snatched away by other universities.

School report inflation lies within the high schools’ responsibility as well as the universities’. As Seoul National University first adopted the percentage system of student class ranking, other universities raced to adopt the absolute evaluation system to seize specialty school students who were disadvantaged in the university’s system, and this amplified the school report inflation.

Is Education Ministry Responsible?—

There was suspicion that universities were adopting the high school ranking system, but some point out that it was the Education Ministry that worsened the situation. In fact, there was an occasion where admission heads of major universities such as Seoul National, Korea, Yonsei, and Ewha Women’s University gathered in April 2000 and discussed methods to reflect scholastic ability differences among high schools beginning in the college entrance year, 2002.

However, the education ministry repeats its claim saying, “We cannot allow the high school ranking system, and there is no ground for the claim that there are scholastic differences among high schools.”

The ministry is changing from the current absolute evaluation system of high school reports to the relative evaluation starting in the 2008 college entrance in order to prevent school report inflation. However, it is true in fact that there isn’t any silver bullet through this problem of scholastic differences of varying schools that exists in reality.

Seong-Chul Hong Hyo-Lim Son sungchul@donga.com aryssong@donga.com