Specialty High School Students to Have Restrictions in Choosing College Majors

Specialty high school students will have disadvantages if they enter college under a major in the different subject area from what they studied in high school, starting from the 2008 academic year.

Under the “Specialty High School Normalization Policy,” proclaimed by the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development on October 24, specialty high schools will be prevented from offering curriculums or intensive courses that are different from their foundation objectives, and regulate foreign language high schools to fill 50 percent of the students’ major curriculums with foreign language courses.

The policy will be applied to high school freshmen who apply to college from late this month for the 2005 school year.

The ministry will only allow school to extend course credits only under the category of professional subjects. This means foreign language high schools are only allowed to extend their course credits under foreign language courses. The ministry will announce the fixed version of the educational course design and management guideline sometime in November.

The ministry also decided to adopt a special incentive entry program for specialty high school graduates who choose majors in the same subject area when they apply to college. Starting in the 2008 academic year, these incentives will be offered to foreign language high school students who apply for foreign language majors and science school students to science and technology majors.

Seong-Chul Hong sungchul@donga.com