Law Schools to Be Selected from Five Districts

Korean colleges are making all-out efforts to be eligible for opening a law school after requirements for building graduate schools were recently finalized.

Qualified colleges in five districts (Seoul, Daejeon, Daegu, Busan, and Gwangju) will be chosen.

The Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development (MOE) has gone through deliberations from the Committee for Legal Education on October 30 and announced its final criteria for law schools.

Applications are due on November 30. The MOE has announced that the aggregate number of students has been finalized at 2,000.

Each district contains the following provinces: Seoul: Seoul, Gyeonggi, Incheon and Gangwon; Daejeon: Daejeon, and North and South Chungcheong; Daegu: Daegu and North Gyeongsang; Busan: Busan, South Gyeongsang and Ulsan; Gwangju: Gwangju, North and South Jeolla, and Jeju Island.

The MOE said, “Schools will be selected from each district, but no school can be selected when there is not a qualified school.”

Criteria consider nine areas and 132 items on a 1,000-point scale. The nine areas are: selection process, curriculum, teachers, students, education facilities, budget, degree course quality, competitiveness, and social accountability.

Curriculum and teacher scores are weighted 34.5 percent and 19.5 percent, respectively, taking up more than half of the total.

Notably, new requirements include: the number of students who have passed the Korean Bar examination, the average number of students who passed the exam over the last five years, and the ratio of graduates from the law department to exam passers.

The other newly included criteria are whether the applying schools have received sanctions regarding school administration and its budget in the past three years.

Ten criteria in detail will be applied on a pass-or-fail basis, so a fail in one item could disqualify applicants.

The10 criteria include: the share of full-time professors, requiring that more than one third of students be from other undergraduate schools, and the abolishment of undergraduate schools of law.

The committee is expected to examine applicants’ documents and conduct field tests by January next year. The committee is scheduled to submit the outcome of their examinations to the education minister.

The minister is expected to announce approved schools by January 2008 and check whether the selected schools have acquired enough teachers. Based on schools’ preparation, the minister will announce the final winners by September of the same year.

foryou@donga.com