https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67769253
South Korea's Suneung, which determines college admission, is one of the hardest exams in the world.
A number of measures to help students concentrate are taken during the annual event such as closing the country's airspace and delaying the opening of the stock market.
That is what thinking of the children really looks like. Here in the US we just make stupid age verification laws for porn sites like it is going to make porn hard for teenagers to get.
from what one hears about the pressure of these exams, i dont think the reasons for those measures are as wholesome as assumed in this comment.
these exams are amongst the most competitive in the world and their outcome provides only a single window which dictates the rest of your life. that is not a system worth boasting about.
That is what thinking of the children really looks like.
Lol sorry, but no. Korean educational culture is absolutely not about "thinking of the children". It is completely normal in Korea for kids to go to their regular school, then go to multiple hours of hagwon, and then have their homework and study to do. Being severely sleep-deprived is very common.
Then there's the stress caused by these exams. Yeah they do all those things to help give students the maximum ability to focus, but that's only necessary because of how much pressure is riding on the results of these exams. University placements are even more important in Korea than they are in America, which from my perspective seems to itself have far more significance than which university you go to here in Australia.
The government is banning the after school cram school though. But everyone is still doing it anyway. It's a society's problem.
It's a society's problem.
Oh sure, hagwon is a societal problem in Korea, but it's a problem that stems from how highly competitive the whole education system is, which in turn stems from the very patriarchal culture where companies highly respect some unis and not so much others, as well as the high degree of personal value derived from where and how hard you work. It's a much deeper issue than merely hagwon itself.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A group of South Korean students are suing the government because their college admission examination ended 90 seconds earlier than scheduled.
A number of measures to help students concentrate are taken during the annual event such as closing the country's airspace and delaying the opening of the stock market.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by at least 39 students, claims that the bell rang earlier at a test site in the capital Seoul during Korean - the first subject of the exam.
The teachers recognised the mistake before the start of the next session, and gave the one and half minutes back during the lunch break but they could only mark blank columns left on their papers and were not allowed to change any existing answers.
In April, a court in Seoul awarded 7 million won ($5,250; £4,200) to students who claimed they were disadvantaged at the 2021 Suneung exam because their bell rang about two minutes earlier.
In 2012, a man in China was given a one-year suspended sentence for ringing the bell four minutes and 48 seconds early during the national college entrance exam at a school in Hunan province.
The original article contains 383 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 50%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Is there an actual reason they don’t stagger the exams over a week or so instead of this all or nothing, life changing death grind?
Because some people will get harder questions than others in certain sessions, and people will not feel they got an equally difficult exam as others. And they'd be right.
I meant more like math on monday, Korean(?) on tuesday, foreign language on wed and so on. That way the students would have just one or maybe two subjects each day, without anyone being disadvantaged, and they would still have a lot less stress and more opportunity to prepare them properly for the next subject.
Oh, ok, it seems I was the one who didn't know enough about this. I didn't realize in Korea they did all sections in one day. That's unheard of where I'm from... They're always on different days. Hard to justify, indeed.