Public to decide on college admissions reform
College admissions reform cannot satisfy all universities
Public opinion will play a key role in selecting the 2022 college admissions reform.
The Presidential Committee on National Education’s announced it will use the same selection method that was used to resume operation of nuclear reactors in the country.
The Moon Jae-in administration pledged to halt the use of the Shin Kori 5 and 6 nuclear reactors, but after the civic participation group voted in favor of the nuclear reactors, the government resumed operations.
“As you can see with opertions Shin Kori 5 and 6 we have successfully gathered public opinion, we are at a time when it’s more important to find consensus from the public,” said President Moon Jae-in in January.
The decision was made by 471 people that were selected from a pool of 20,000 to vote on whether to resume construction.
At the end, the regular citizen group voted 59.5 percent in favor to resume.
A similar method will be used to select the 2022 college admissions reform.
However, the process is much more complex than deciding to build and operate nuclear reactors.
“Shin Kori 5 and 6 was a twodimensional decision as they had to be for or against the building of nuclear reactors.
However, there are scores of scenarios and combination of variables when selecting a college admissions reform,” said Kim Hak-lin, member of the public opinion committee.
The college reform has scores of combinations variables and models that need to be simplified.
The reform includes combining regular and non-scheduled admis- sions, and changing the evaluating method of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT).
However, just the two alone have dozens of variables that need to be put into consideration. Also there is no guarantee a single reform will have popularity among other models.
Difficult to increase regular admissions
The Moon administration has been seeking to expand regular admissions.
However, eight out of 10 high school seniors applying for university this year are entering through non-scheduled admissions.
This categorizes students based on their academic grades and school reports correlated to the majors they apply for.
The head of the committee says it is nearly impossible to select a reform standard that suits all universities in the nation as they have different procedures in admitting students.
“It is difficult to have a standard ratio of regular and non-scheduled admissions,” said Kim Jin-kyung, head of the Presidential Committee on National Education.
“Rural and private universities hardly ever accept students through the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT), (most go through non-scheduled admissions) if the government slightly increases regular admissions to 20 percent that itself could be troublesome.”
The reform model will be selected at a workshop consisting of parents, teachers and 20 to 25 education experts.
They will evaluate the pros and cons of the different models and narrow them down to four to five.
“People who have prior experience with the college entrance exam reform should be in the decision making process. Those people’s opinions must be put in through surveys,” said Kim, a mother of two middle school children.
Afterwards, the 400-member civic participation group will be in charge of voting for the best reform to be implemented for the 2022 school year.
“400 participants will study for a month four or five college admissions models and afterwards will take part in a survey and will vote for the best reform,” said Han Dong-sup, spokesman for the committee.
Shifting responsibility
The Ministry of Education has passed its decision-making responsibility for reform on to the Presidential Committee on National Education, as any decision made is likely to meet a public backlash.
The education ministry will honor the decision made by the committee.
The committee has set up a public opinion committee, which will technically have the last call in selecting the 2022 college admissions reform.
“There is a big difference from a college admissions perspective of an ideal student and the public’s perspective,” said Lee Sung-ho, professor of education at Chungang University.
“The government, consisting of scores of experts, is backing away from making a decision. Instead, it wants to enforce a system of direct democracy, where the public (non-experts) are in charge of selecting college reform, which is a problem.”
“It is difficult to have a standard ratio between regular and non-scheduled admissions. ”