a rant about korean education
i originally wrote this in an unpublished blogpost's footnote lol.
more people's been notetaking in my class as they need to prepare for tests. sometimes it's sad that they will only notetake / try to understand the content for tests, i mean yes tests are useful but only to a certain level, it's supposed to motivate you to study not become the final goal. unfortunately the korean education system is all about tests and whatever innovative approach korea tries to make to its education, people complain about how it's hard to evaluate fairly and we all revert back to standardized grading that erases the purpose of the innovative approach. why do you think korean high schools are called formative assessment hell (수행지옥) and people want formative assessments gone? it's people obsessing on standardized assessments, cuz it's fair when it's standardized and it should be fair because it determines people's unis and unis are important because they totally differ in quality. so i think maybe we should equalize unis in korea too or at least reduce the gap? like there's a quote i heard about korean education, 'the purpose of assessments is to enhance education, but in reality education is being used for enhancing assessments.'
but then someone refuted me that one of the biggest reasons elite unis are good at teaching and get all that support is because the students have the ability to follow all the good teaching and programs and they deserve support, and the students have this ability because they are influenced by other good students. and equalizing unis would prevent good students from getting a good education. but what we should do instead is change how we assess students, right now assessments are mostly standardized tests, but we should change assessments to performance based ones. and we should give teachers more freedom on what they could write on student records, like teachers should be able to comment on someone's report card if they have bad behavior in class.
but my question is, why can't teachers write something bad about their students? because that would impact the student negatively in their future because student records already matter a lot to uni entrance, and nobody wants students to be disadvantaged, even the teacher. we already have this thing called 학생부종합전형 and that actually makes teachers stress about writing better student records. like i watched this one documentary about how teachers will make up the students' activities or make people outside of school / generative AI write student records. and it's also criticized for being unfair, because at the end of the day whatever the method is, you have to rank students and decide who's going to seoul vs. konkuk university. and student records can't be ranked like standardized scores and now everyone's angry. and now we're back to the point that primary and secondary education just crumbles in front of this competitive uni entrance thing. that person also mentioned and the reason companies hire from elite universities is that there's a higher chance these people will be hardworking and skilled, like unis are one of the biggest clues that employers can know about a person when all they've got is a document. well then i ask you, why would you drop people from a job through such a surface level process? and the point about elite universities only functioning well because of students, well yes i do get that more students in elite unis are hardworking and skilled, and ppl of different skills need different things. but if that's the case we should support students that are less skilled to study or get a job in different ways, after all there are many hardworking students that do not make it into elite unis or are not as skilled as others. but people constantly undermine non-elite universities (see 지잡대, a word used to look down on non-elite universities outside of seoul) and label students of those unis as inferior. they mentioned 'many students in non-elite unis don't work hard anyways', which is why a lot of things don't work in non-elite unis. then why are these students even in university? the social pressure that you are a second class human if you don't go to university? or because they believe they can't get a job without going to university? oh wait actually that makes sense, some people are skilled enough to get a job without going to university (after all many famous ppl have said that unis are not very useful anymore) but some people aren't, and at least university makes you look better in front of people and the job market. well it would make more sense for them to work hard if they were desperate, and it would make sense to find people who are hardworking but don't get as much results / people who want to work hard but can't for some reason and support them. and as i said earlier many ppl have claimed that uni isn't the answer for everyone, and it would help more to accept that fact and let some people study and get jobs in other ways that do not involve going to uni, instead of looking down on them.
anyways my point is that the korean board of education is way too idealistic when it comes to their policies, by not seeing primary and secondary education as related to teritiary education and the job market. and i do not know how those things work so do not take my words seriously and educate me.
update 2026-02-06: if my claim that no innovative approach to education works properly as long as there's this kind of competition, maybe i should check out what happens to korean schools who do have innovative approaches, like IB schools, and maybe international schools? international schools don't aim for korean unis, and i've heard they are pretty competitive like regular korean schools, so is it because the education quality gap depending on the uni they go, or is it because korea has a competitive atmosphere in general?