Controversy Grows Over SAT-GPA Discrepancy

There is a controversy brewing between the government and universities over how heavily school performance records should be taken into account when it comes to admitting students to colleges. In the meantime, a new study shows that students whose Korean SAT scores are high have good GPAs, but not the other way around.

A college entrance exam counseling web site, www.uwayedu.com, an affiliate of uway.com, analyzed performance levels of 16,000 students who used the site to apply for the official entrance exam for the 2007 school year. The study results that came out on June 18 showed that the matching rate of entrance exam scores and school performance record averages were higher than that of school performance records compared to entrance exam scores.

The web site analyzed the average level of four test scores in Korean, math, foreign languages, and science and technology, using the student’s level of school performance as the standard. Accordingly, students whose high school GPAs were in the top quartile averaged 3.5 on the Korean SAT test for liberal arts majors and 4.3 for science majors.

When the national SAT is used as the standard, students whose SAT scores were ranked at the top averaged 2.14 high school GPAs for liberal arts majors and 1.93 for science majors. When the high school GPAs were used as the standard, the difference was less than half.

Students with a national SAT level of two had a GPA of 2.67 for liberal arts majors and 2.6 for science majors.

inchul@donga.com