Hundreds of thousands of youths take the college scholastic aptitude test Thursday across the country. As they head to their testing places, many are hoping that they do not encounter questions that could trap them in an extended dispute like Question No. 8 of the World Geography section in the 2013 CSAT.
During the past year, “World Geography Question No. 8” became the code word for bureaucratic ineptitude and audacity in Korea’s state-controlled college entrance process. At the center of the controversy over the 
erroneous question was a government-funded educational research body called the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, which is responsible for compiling CSAT questions.
Other players included the Ministry of Education, which responded indecisively to complaints from those who claimed to have been disadvantaged because of the absurd question; two geography societies, which judged it “faultless”; and the Seoul Administrative Court, which in the initial trial ruled that KICE had not made a mistake. The Seoul Appeals Court decided that Question No. 8 was wrong last month and the ruling was confirmed as KICE decided not to make an appeal to the Supreme Court.
Now, the complicated question is how to remedy the “losses” of the 18,000 examinees who chose the right answer but lost three points on the test because of the flawed question. Education Minister Hwang Woo-yea said that his ministry would do everything it could to save the “victims,” including submitting a special bill to the National Assembly with detailed measures. But, after the passage of a full academic year, it is an impossible thing to do.
The world economy changes every minute, but the CSAT staff at KICE ignored this and trusted old figures (2009 or earlier) on the economic sizes of the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement as quoted by textbooks and a study aid publication by the state-run Educational Broadcasting System. They failed to note that NAFTA had overtaken the EU in combined gross national product in 2010. Yet, many students knew better and chose the correct answer to the faulty question.
It was a typical twisted question asking examinees to pick a combination of correct descriptions about A (the EU) and B (NAFTA), with four choices: 1) With the emergence of B, foreign investment in Mexico increased rapidly; 2) Both A and B impose common tariffs on trade with outside regions; 3) A is greater than B in combined gross domestic product; and 4) B has a greater volume of internal trade than A. Only 1) is right but KICE insisted that 3) too is right, and fought in court for a year after four of the complaining students filed a suit.
KICE spent 82 million won ($80,000) from its CSAT budget to hire six lawyers to defend its position in the initial and appellate trials. (In an unrelated development, lawmakers learned through an administrative inspection that KICE, with a research staff of 182, spent 800 million won from its expense account at a nearby Italian restaurant during a three-year period ending in July 2014. This amounts to 54,000 servings of 15,000 won pasta, according to Rep. Kim Sang-min of the Saenuri Party.)
Thus, the research organization under the supervision of the Prime Minister’s Office came under heavy societal criticism for the first official nullification of a CSAT question since the state examination for college entrance was adopted 20 years ago. KICE and education authorities were blamed for laxity in reviewing the quality of questions while making extreme security efforts during the whole process of compiling them, printing exam papers and delivering them to testing places.
Particularly deserving of censure is former KICE director Sung Tae-je, who chose to get involved in a court battle instead of simply admitting the mistake and triumphantly left the organization last April after winning the initial trial. He should share the blame with the representatives of the two academic societies who testified in court in favor of KICE over a question that was clear to anyone with common sense.
The yearlong controversy over the World Geography Question No. 8 represents just one of the problems in our society, reputedly the most education-obsessed in the world. The great importance of college entrance in our society makes the annual state examination the climax of the entire secondary education. Scores from the one-day examination decide which universities our sons and daughters can and cannot apply to, and the names of the institutions they attend in the forthcoming years mean so much throughout their whole life.
The process of college entrance has become increasingly complicated, thanks to the advancement of information technology. The authorities used trial and error to devise one new system after another to broaden the opportunities for applying to university and suppress costly off-school studies. Well-meaning efforts were frustrated by overambitious managers of universities bent on raising their rankings and entrepreneurs in the “education industry” who earn more from severer competition.
Politics entered and disrupted the educational arena. The outlawed “Jeongyojo,” the progressive National Teachers’ Union, split the teachers’ community and threatened to ideologically influence young students. Then the national map became divided into leftist and rightist zones with the direct election of 17 education superintendents each responsible for educational administration up to the secondary-school level in nine provinces and eight special cities.
Those classified by the media as “progressive superintendents” are exercising their power by putting their political ideologies into practice, canceling the licenses for “independent private high schools” given under the previous administration. New controversies have arisen as some progressive educational superintendents have called for pushing back school opening hours to 9 a.m. in the name of “promoting students’ welfare.” Early implementation of tuition ― free education is the major goal of the progressives, confronting the budget-strapped central government.
After a quarter century, the CSAT, or “Suneung” in Korean, seems to have reached its limit in its complexity of grading examinees. It seems that the time has come to review the whole system, not to make just another change but to start a 10-year or 20-year renovation program, taking new economic and demographic conditions into account. As concerned people have long suggested, the ultimate solution will be returning to the old system ― to let the individual universities select their students with complete independence.
By Kim Myong-sik
Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. ― Ed.
