The unrelenting pressure cooker of South Korea's college entrance examination, universally known as the Suneung, reached a critical boiling point this year, culminating in the unprecedented resignation of the very official responsible for its administration. The catalyst for this severe fallout was the English language section, which proved so profoundly difficult that examinees and critics alike branded it "insane" and akin to "deciphering an ancient script."
In the wake of intense public scrutiny and academic uproar, Oh Seung-geol, the head of the institution overseeing the Suneung, stepped down to bear responsibility for the "chaos" the test's difficulty levels inflicted. "We sincerely accept the criticism that the difficulty of questions... was inappropriate," Oh stated, admitting that despite multiple rigorous editing rounds, the examination "fell short" of its standards.
The Anatomy of an 'Impossible' Test
The complexity of the English test was exemplified by several notoriously daunting questions. These included a question based on Immanuel Kant's philosophy of law and another highly technical passage involving gaming jargon and virtual reality dynamics.
The latter question, valued at three points, challenged students to correctly identify the single most appropriate placement for a given sentence within a complex, highly specialized paragraph.
The inserted sentence in question:
The difference is that the action in the game world can only be explored through the virtual bodily space of the avatar.
The surrounding technical passage:
A video game has its own model of reality, internal to itself and separate from the player's external reality, the player's bodily space and the avatar's bodily space. (1) The avatar's bodily space, the potential actions of the avatar in the game world, is the only way in which the reality of the external reality of the game world can be perceived. (2) As in the real world, perception requires action. (3) [Insertion Point] Players extend their perceptual field into the game, encompassing the available actions of the avatar. (4) The feedback loop of perception and action that enables you to navigate the world around you is now one step removed: instead of perceiving primarily through interaction of your own body with the external world, you're perceiving the game world through interaction of the avatar. (5) The entire perceptual system has been extended into the game world.
(The correct answer is 3.)
The convoluted and overly academic phrasing of this and several other questions drew immediate and widespread condemnation. Social media critics described the prose as "fancy smart talking" and "awful writing [that] doesn't convey a concept or idea well."
Diminished Success and Deeper Academic Critique
The tangible impact of the test's difficulty was evident in the results: a mere 3% of this year's test-takers achieved the highest grade in the English section, a significant plunge from the 6% who did so the previous year.
Students confirmed the intense struggle. Im Na-hye, a senior at Hanyeong High School, noted, "It took me a long time to figure out [several questions] and understanding the texts themselves was tricky... [Some] answers looked similar to each other. So I was unsure until the last minute."
English language professor Jung Chae-kwan, who once worked for the Suneung's administrative body, pushed back against the term "tough," instead characterizing the test as "maddeningly confusing." He lamented that this style of examination renders the material "useless for actual education."
"Teachers end up drilling test-taking hacks rather than teaching English... You don't even really need to read the full text to get the points if you know the tricks," Prof. Jung, now at Incheon National University, explained.
A significant issue highlighted by critics is the practice of extracting passages from specialized works, such as the gaming jargon text taken from Game Feel, a guide on game design by Steve Swink. Divorced from their original context, these excerpts become nearly impossible to comprehend under timed, high-stakes conditions.
The Purpose of Difficulty
Conversely, some academics defended the test's rigorous nature, arguing it fulfills a necessary evaluative role. Kim Soo-yeon, an English literature professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, stated that the difficulty reflects the test's intended purpose: "It measures students' reading comprehension and whether they can handle the level of material they'll encounter in university." She added that the chosen passages intentionally possess "some degree of specialisation" to effectively assess these higher-order comprehension skills.
The Suneung's Monumental Shadow
Held every November, the Suneung is an infamous eight-hour marathon of back-to-back exams covering subjects like Korean, Mathematics, English, and Social and Natural Sciences, with students tackling roughly 200 questions in total. This exam is not merely a university entrance criterion; it is a life-altering event that significantly impacts an individual's career prospects, income potential, and future social standing.
The pressure is immense, driving many teenagers to dedicate their entire lives to preparing for the test, often starting private tuition, known as "cram schools," from as young as four years old.
The significance of the Suneung is so profound that the entire nation mobilizes for a single day: construction work is halted, commercial planes are grounded, and military training is suspended to ensure an optimal, distraction-free environment for the test-takers.
The resignation of Oh Seung-geol marks a notable milestone in the test's history. Since the Suneung's debut in 1993, only four of the twelve chiefs have completed their full three-year terms. While previous resignations were typically prompted by errors within the test questions, Mr. Oh is the first to step down solely because of the excessive difficulty of the examination itself.
0 Comments