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South Korean students' 'year of hell' culminates with exams day - CNN.com - 0 views

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South Korea students schools exams standardized testing education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 25 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Seoul (CNN) -- Most South Korean students consider their final year in high school "the year of hell." It is when all students are put to the ultimate test. About 700,000 test applicants sat down in classrooms across the country Thursday to take their college entrance exams -- also known as the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT).
  • For many, this one test -- which lasts a good eight hours -- will determine which university they enter. It is considered the chance to make or break one's future. In a country where more than 80% of high school students move on to higher-level education, getting into a prestigious school is all the more competitive. The final year leading up to the test is one of most intense periods students will ever experience.
  • Many test-takers will give up sleep, living sometimes on only five hours of rest a day throughout the year. Family members live nervously in fear that they will disrupt the mood of their high-school child.
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  • South Korea's obsession with education and academic success is rooted in Confucianism. The long practice of equating social status with academic achievement has left behind a tradition of pouring everything into studying.
  • From elementary school ages, South Koreans will spend many hours in cram schools after their regular classes. Almost 75% of the student population last year took up private education, according to the Ministry of Education.
  • For a senior high school student, a study routine will include self-study sessions at school, cram school classes and more self-studying hours late into the night at private cubicles. This is all on top of their regular class hours.
  • The psychological burden is such that South Korea suffers from high student suicide rates. More than 200 students committed suicide in 2009 and about 150 the following year, according to Ahn's Presidential Advisory Council on Education, Science and Technology.
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South Korea: Kids, Stop Studying So Hard! - TIME - 0 views

www.time.com/...0,9171,2094427,00.html

South Korea exams testing education learning students schools cram

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 30 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them. In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.
  • South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.
  • There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."
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  • South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.
  • The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.
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