Programs, infrastructure prerequisite for test-free semester system

The Education Ministry announced Tuesday it will introduce a test-free semester system to enable junior high school students be freed from exams to seek career opportunities by easing burdens from taking tests. In this free-learning semester system, students don`t need to take mid-term and final exams. Pilot operation will begin in 42 schools from September this year to be expanded to all junior high schools by 2016.

Test-free semester is the key education pledge of the Park Geun-hye administration, while admissions officer system was the key project for the former Lee Myung-bak administration. Students can escape from test burdens and be given chances to nurture capabilities of creativity, personality and self-led learning. William Damon, a professor of education at Stanford University and leading scholar of human development, said the reason teenagers are suffering from anxiety and lethargy is because they lack sense of direction and purpose in life. College students have opportunities for various activities, such as exchange student and internship, but junior high school students are enslaved with exams. It is a meaningful effort in this sense to free them from exams and help them seek future.

One test-free semester among a total 24 semesters won`t disturb the school`s overall curriculum. The system has a good purpose of helping students seek long-term goals in life. Good purpose doesn`t guarantee success, however. Since high school and college entrance systems are still in place, parents and students could turn to private education as they worry decline in scholastic ability. The Education Ministry said the achievements made in a test-free semester will not be reflected on high school entrance, but it is skeptical whether students will focus on a program that is not reflected in entrance exams.

They core of the free-test semester system is full-time job search activities, which means job experience. For example, if a student wants to become a cartoonist, he or she can become a pupil of an actual cartoonist to experience making cartoons and the experience is accepted as a course. The success lies in supplying various programs suiting to students` interest. However, there are not sufficient infrastructures including professional teachers at experience centers, meaning time could be wasted and experience could remain the scratch of surface. The rich and the poor in activities might exist depending on capabilities and interests of schools and parents.

Through a pilot operation of the free-test semester system, the education authorities should thoroughly examine whether the program can become a stable education system before adopting it in all schools. Parents and students are more than exhausted as education policies are varying for changes in government. The success of the free-test semester system depends on full support by companies and society, not just by schools themselves.