hankyoreh

 A high school senior in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province, cautiously opens their results of the 2023 CSAT on Dec. 9, when scores were sent out to test takers. (Yonhap)

During my daily subway commute, I see a lot of students sporting letter jackets with the name of their school adorned in bold for everyone to see. Many of the school names that I see belong to institutions that make the upper half of Korea’s university rankings, names that even middle school students have memorized.

It may simply be the father-of-two aspect in me being petty, but whenever I see those jackets, I start to wonder: What if, in the very same subway car, there is a university student from a “no-name” university? Would they feel discouraged and disheartened to see a student from a school higher up in rank proudly flaunting their prestigious school’s name?

Dismissing the letter jackets, known as “gwajam” in Korean, as mere fashion items would be naive. It would be more accurate to say that the jackets in how they distinguish their wearers from the crowd are part of South Korea’s age-old traditional hierarchy system. In a society where people are constantly put in an order and sorted into ranks according to such distinctions, it is natural that many feel frustration and dismay rather than superiority. Pyramids, by their very nature, are wider at the bottom than at the top.

Of course, I understand the students’ need to be recognized by others. Only those who manage to withstand intense competition are worthy of wearing the jacket they don. Why wouldn’t they want to show off to everyone and say, “That’s right, I go to this university”? When I think about how much effort they must’ve put into obtaining that quite literal label, I feel pity.

It may even be fair to call such students victims of a society that forces them to internalize competition from a very early age. While many Koreans tut-tut the youth of today for their flimsy belief in meritocracy and their obsession with “fairness,” but such qualities are probably sad indicators of a society addicted to competition.

The College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), known commonly as the “suneung” here, plays a key role in deciding university rankings. When admissions season is over, many online communities discuss the outcomes, saying things like “We’re up there,” or “This university overtook this university in the rankings,” squabbling over the prestigiousness of their own institutions. CSAT scores all but decide what university a given student goes to. Korea even coined a term for those who watch university rankings like it were a sport: credential hooligans.

The CSAT manages to place people in a row because it is a relative evaluation. There is nothing better than the CSAT, which ranks all Korean students one after the other, making sure that there is a first place and a last place.

In a system in which relative grading is key, even if all the people in the system tried their best, they are all given a numbered rank. Everyone is sucked into this never-ending competition, but this wretched system ensures that only a few come out victorious — everyone else comes out a loser.

On Nov. 10, exactly one week before this year’s CSAT, a constitutional petition claiming that “college admissions are unconstitutional” was filed. It was based on the premise that the relative evaluation system of the CSAT and school reports instigate “murderous competition,” which goes against the right to pursue happiness, the right to a healthy and pleasant environment, and the equal right of education, amongst other fundamental rights.

This constitutional petition, led by World Without Worries about Shadow Education, a non-profit organization focused on education, was supported by 96 lawyers who put out a statement in which they declared the system unconstitutional.

“The reasoning behind forcing victories that involve crushing other people and making evaluations that are based solely on creating a 1% elite is not justifiable,” they wrote. “It is self-destructive, anti-education, and far from humane.”

Seeing close to 100 lawyers, who have been “victors” in highly competitive situations that would’ve involved countless evaluations of them relative to their peers, stand by this petition was surprising.

Meanwhile, conservatives insist that there should be even more competition. However, South Korea has never lacked competition; in fact, too much competition has given birth to many malaises.

If you look at the results of a survey carried out by Kim Hi-sam, a professor at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, in which college students from four different countries (South Korea, China, Japan and the US) were asked what image was closest to the daily lives of high school students, 81% South Korean college students said that it was akin to a “desperate battlefield.” The proportion of Korean students who characterized high schoolers’ lives as such was much higher than in China (42%), the US (40%) and Japan (13.8%).

In a school environment like this, it is virtually impossible to teach students the importance of caring for and understanding the less privileged, as well as the importance of solidarity, which are sensibilities rooted in a sense of community.

Jonathan Gershuny, a professor at the University of Oxford, compared South Korea’s college admission system to “the never-ending weapons competition of the Cold War” in an interview with the Weekly Dong-A.

We think that relative evaluation is more than natural, but countries with developed economies do not use relative evaluation to determine college admissions. The global standard is straightforward: If you meet a certain standard, you are given the opportunity to go to college. That doesn’t bring the global statuses of those countries down, in fact, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say that those countries are “lesser” than South Korea.

Relative grading is only useful as a selection mechanism, and it has nothing to do with the essence of education, which is to help people grow through learning. Some still hold steadfastly to the opinion that this sort of system is essential for keeping the college admissions system rigorous, but that logic is basically the tail wagging the dog.

Of course, there is a cumbersome thing that needs to be eradicated in order to change the high school grading scale from relative evaluation to absolute evaluation, namely the school hierarchy that was formed under the pretext of diversifying schools.

If we turn to absolute grading while holding on to this hierarchy, in which special purpose high schools and autonomous private high schools still exist, it will do nothing but let those schools strengthen their so-called “admissions privilege.” Competition for admission will only get worse when students start thinking about advancing to high school.

It is highly unlikely that, in a society in which competition is considered unavoidable, the conservative Constitutional Court of Korea will rule relative evaluation as unconstitutional. However, it means a lot that the public is now more aware of how brutal the relative evaluation system is in how it eggs students to compete until the bitter end.

When people grow overly accustomed to a certain concept, it is difficult for them to acknowledge the concept as problematic, which in turn impedes the possibility of coming up with an alternative.

Alfie Kohn, an American educational psychologist, pointed out in his book “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” that the heart of competition is in its mutual exclusivity, in which one person must fail for another to succeed.

No one knows how many “losers” will be disheartened because of this year’s college admissions. Many will think about re-taking the CSAT after finishing one semester at the college they got into. What will parents feel, seeing their children going through so much stress? Why must we hold in such regard a system so tainted, one that depresses us all?

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]