7 ms·

Suneung: The day silence falls over South Korea

43 points by onemoresoop 8y ago

isostatic 8y ago
"That's why we spend 12 years preparing for this one day. I know people who've taken this exam up to five times." OK, so it's not really "one day" then. I don't understand why. "Instead of pitying us, I wish foreigners would think how awesome we are." Passing exams is a pointless activity. I'm more interested in results. Those results can be measured in many ways - in power, in lives saved in surgery, in money, in kindness, in criminals caught, in lines of code, in numbers of citations in academic papers, in how many followers you have on Instagram. Korea is a fairly successful country, but it's not leaps and bounds above other countries that don't have this level of stress. It's not something I want my country to aspire to.
- kbumsik 8y ago
  That "five times" means spending extra four years, one exam per year, without doing anything else but preparing for the exam to enter a college. So most people really hope to finish it in "one day".
- akfanta 8y ago
  > I don't understand why. It's because you don't live in a highly competitive society. People try everything they can to squeeze extra points out of these exams. It's the only way to get into good universities. Why do you have to go to good universities? When thousands of people applying for one job, the company will try to find the fastest way to filter out applicants, and your degree is the easiest way for you to stand out. In an ultra competitive society, you do everything you could to stand out, otherwise you won't stand a chance.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    And the results are somewhat good with formerly Japan and now South Korea being one of the leaders in innovation. Albeit much less competitive China, USA, France and Germany are still close enough. The problem with Japanese and Korean style of achievement is that it can get you to rest on your laurels and additionally it is anti-creative, strongly promoting patterns, knowledge and effort over novel approaches. All in all, few types, perhaps even none, of standardized tests allow novel solutions.
    - thedeepself 8y ago
      > And the results are somewhat good with formerly Japan and now South Korea being one of the leaders in innovation. Albeit much less competitive China, USA, France and Germany are still close enough. If you consider suicide being the leading cause of death between 11 and 30 among S. Koreans, the results are good.
    - wenc 8y ago
      > Albeit much less competitive China I'm not sure about this. From what I've read, Chinese society is more competitive, not less.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Competing to finish in the top 3% of an arbitrary test isn’t really useful. Setting up your youth to have 97% be failures isn’t really useful.
fhood 8y ago
That sucks. And it makes me feel like maybe SATs aren't so bad. I feel like scoring well on the SAT doesn't actually require preparation, just high literacy and a willingness to think the questions through.
- wenc 8y ago
  Getting a high/near-perfect score on the SAT does require preparation due to time pressure. SAT candidates need to be able to arrive at the correct answer almost instinctively (mostly via pattern-matching and some reasoning). This entails practice. The material tested in the US SATs is relatively unsophisticated compared to the curricula of many East Asian countries. My understanding is that SATs test for quickness of reasoning more than anything else. (SAT subject tests go into more depth, but are still have nowhere near the coverage of East Asian exams)
  - fhood 8y ago
    > Getting a high/near-perfect score on the SAT does require preparation due to time pressure. Sure, but it is completely possible to get a very high score with virtually no practice. Time constraints are an issue, but not too huge of one, so long as you are willing to trust your gut so to speak. > The material tested in the US SATs is relatively unsophisticated compared to the curricula of many East Asian countries. That is exactly why I think the SAT is superior.
    - wenc 8y ago
      > Sure, but it is completely possible to get a very high score with virtually no practice Only if you are naturally highly intelligent. Folks of above average intelligence (but not in the upper percentiles) tend to need to work at it (many do and succeed). > That is exactly why I think the SAT is superior. Only if you are interested in "g" intelligence alone as a pure metric, in which case psychometric instruments like the Advanced Raven Progressive Matrices should also be admissible. The SATs give you one metric of preparedness for college, arguably an important one. But the East Asian exams give you another: grit. It's much harder for a smart person to succeed at them without any effort. That said, I'm not condoning them since I believe the East Asian focus on exams often does go overboard and devolves into mismeasurement (i.e. how good you are at taking tests). But intelligence, measured in isolation, is not a good metric for college-readiness especially in technical fields, where you need a certain measure of grit to do well in the material. I've known stars in high school who struggled when they had to apply themselves.... when you're used to things coming easily to you all your life, it can be demoralizing to have to work at things.
qalmakka 8y ago
Things like these should make any nation ashamed of itself. This kind of pressure on a growing child can only destroy him or her, and it's no wonder why kids are killing themselves. It's like planting a ticking bomb in their heads and hoping it wouldn't explode if something goes wrong. As a highly educated person myself, I can't deny that studying, learning and improving yourselves are fundamental parts of the process of growing up and becoming a useful member of society, but it can't be done at the expense of someone's sanity, because it totally nullifies its value. Stuffing a kid of knowledge like a pâté goose stops him or her from really enjoying probably it's most critical years to the fullest, and I just can't really see this as a positive thing.
- black-tea 8y ago
  It could be considered a selective pressure then or, in other words, eugenics.
- peterlk 8y ago
  Well said. I'd also like to add that the opportunity costs of losing bright minds to suicide, burnout, backstabbing, etc. at a higher rate detracts from the argument that this might produce a more productive society. So from a central planner's perspective, this seems like a bad idea too.
- dba7dba 8y ago
  How do you think S. Korea transformed from THE poorest nation on the planet after 1953 end of Korean War to top 10 - 15 nation in a 65 year period? Imagine, there are still people alive who were born in the poorest nation on the planet, and now living in a nation that is ranked 15th in GDP. South Korean passport is ranked 3rd most accepted, tied with Germany and France. It wasn't because of natural resources or oil. It wasn't any modern industry that just had to recover after the war such as Germany or Japan did. South Korea had NO modern industry of any kind, higher education institution, a modern workforce, effective government agencies, etc. S. Korea was literally a hell hole of a nation in 1953. After the WTF period Koreans went through from 1910 to 1953 (after having had a 500 years long kingdom, the Chosun dynasty), South Korea just had to do what was necessary to survive. And only way they saw how was producing a workforce to be productive. And no, Montessori method was not a viable option. You don't have to be a highly educated non-Korean to see the education system is not quite right or wrong. Many highly educated and even not so highly educated people IN S. Korea know the question is valid to ask. Some want a change. Many who immigrated out of S. Korea to US and other nations list 2 reasons for leaving the nation, 1) conscription army and 2) the college entrance exam, the Suneung. But it was a system created at a time when there was no time to debate, but to act quickly to produce a workforce, just to survive as a nation. And it has delivered so far. Yes the suicides are tragic. But consider this. Far more S. Koreans have died (including newborn, young, old) from lack of basic medical care in South Korea when only select few had access to modern medical care up until 1970's, 80's. The nation and citizens couldn't pay for it, for lack of wealth, from due to lack of skills needed by a modern workforce. But now that they can afford it, a nation wide medical care system is in place. Without educating the workforce (and yes the Suneung), they wouldn't have that luxury. Easy for you to say they should be ashamed of that. I quite disagree.
mismatchpair 8y ago
Below is problem 33 of this year's English exam. For the English section of the exam, there are a total of 45 questions; 17 listening comprehension (around 25 minutes) and 28 reading comprehension questions (around 45 minutes). Imagine yourself (if you're non-Korean) trying to comprehend something like this in a completely foreign language. 33. Heritage is concerned with the ways in which very selective material artefacts, mythologies, memories and traditions become resources for the present. The contents, interpretations and representations of the resource are selected according to the demands of the present; an imagined past provides resources for a heritage that is to be passed onto an imagined future. It follows too that the meanings and functions of memory and tradition are defined in the present. Further, heritage is more concerned with meanings than material artefacts. It is the former that give value, either cultural or financial, to the latter and explain why they have been selected from the near infinity of the past. In turn, they may later be discarded as the demands of present societies change, or even, as is presently occurring in the former Eastern Europe, when pasts have to be reinvented to reflect new presents. Thus heritage is __________________. [3 points] ① about preserving universal cultural values ② a mirror reflecting the artefacts of the past ③ neither concerned with the present nor the future ④ as much about forgetting as remembering the past ⑤ a collection of memories and traditions of a society
- wjossey 8y ago
  It's questions like this that make me glad I don't take standardized tests anymore. When I took the GREs in 2008, I received a 480 on the verbal section (which was bad given I was applying to PhD programs), and a perfect 6/6 on the written section. I actually didn't qualify for a handful of programs, because they required ESL students to achieve 500 or greater (so I was below what a non-english speaker needs to score, and I spoke english as a first language). So, somehow I was an excellent writer, but had poor verbal skills. It's remarkable that we test people against this style of language, both domestically in the US and abroad, given the unlikeliness someone will ever stumble across this type of prose. And, if you do, you should really ask the writer why they're trying to be so convoluted in their argument.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  While this is a good taste of Suneung, note that this problem is considered the most difficult one in this year's English exam. (The day after Suneung, major newspapers report the difficulty assessment of the test done by professional analysts. I read about this problem there.)
progressiveweb 8y ago
Here's an example of the type of questions that kids in the "Free Korea" faces: https://external-preview.redd.it/xL79rBC8VK4gI5lej7gFbU1priHRR9Vo2JNI_xHE83g.jpg?auto=webp&s=1ff5a38c025cb72429c40d3ebdb34b412c15cae2 https://external-preview.redd.it/xL79rBC8VK4gI5lej7gFbU1priH... This is only the tip of the iceberg. It appears that in order to force everybody on a normal distribution map, they've gone well past the original purpose of the government exams, which was originally a neo-Confucian artifact to promote egalitarianism-the idea that even peasants who pass the government exams are able to improve their social standing after a long period of caste society based on lineage. This means students aren't tested even on rote memorization or any of the necessary skills in the real world. Instead, they've become victim to the billion dollar industry of extra-cirricular cram schools. Public schools have become completely dependent on a widely unregulated cram schools because it's become impossible to come out on top when everybody is getting specialized help. You can't fault these parents either, these exams are insane and it makes sense that there is demand for extra tutoring. The biggest tragedy of this is that it's no longer egalitarian like in it's tradition, it's about who has the money and can pay for their child's education. Low middle class Korean families can't support the cost of raising a child in this hyper education focused culture with very little prouductivity other than elevating the truly gifted exam takers running the country with no experience other than from books. A big reason why in South Korea, you can commit horrible crimes and almost get a slap on the wrist because of incompetent, unexperienced judges and prosecutors who have mastered the art of climbing the Korean ladder, a giant bureaucracy that permeates through every part of Korean culture. Neo-confucianism is facing significant stress and young Koreans are undergoing social change.
- slededit 8y ago
  I'm not exactly used to answering these questions, but 5 seems the obvious choice here - the others being clearly unrelated. Is this really an example of the difficulty of this exam? If my answer is wrong that would indeed be ironic... I'd love to be corrected.

43 points by onemoresoop 8y ago

"That's why we spend 12 years preparing for this one day. I know people who've taken this exam up to five times." OK, so it's not really "one day" then. I don't understand why. "Instead of pitying us, I wish foreigners would think how awesome we are." Passing exams is a pointless activity. I'm more interested in results. Those results can be measured in many ways - in power, in lives saved in surgery, in money, in kindness, in criminals caught, in lines of code, in numbers of citations in academic papers, in how many followers you have on Instagram. Korea is a fairly successful country, but it's not leaps and bounds above other countries that don't have this level of stress. It's not something I want my country to aspire to.

kbumsik 8y ago
That "five times" means spending extra four years, one exam per year, without doing anything else but preparing for the exam to enter a college. So most people really hope to finish it in "one day".
akfanta 8y ago
> I don't understand why. It's because you don't live in a highly competitive society. People try everything they can to squeeze extra points out of these exams. It's the only way to get into good universities. Why do you have to go to good universities? When thousands of people applying for one job, the company will try to find the fastest way to filter out applicants, and your degree is the easiest way for you to stand out. In an ultra competitive society, you do everything you could to stand out, otherwise you won't stand a chance.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  And the results are somewhat good with formerly Japan and now South Korea being one of the leaders in innovation. Albeit much less competitive China, USA, France and Germany are still close enough. The problem with Japanese and Korean style of achievement is that it can get you to rest on your laurels and additionally it is anti-creative, strongly promoting patterns, knowledge and effort over novel approaches. All in all, few types, perhaps even none, of standardized tests allow novel solutions.
  - thedeepself 8y ago
    > And the results are somewhat good with formerly Japan and now South Korea being one of the leaders in innovation. Albeit much less competitive China, USA, France and Germany are still close enough. If you consider suicide being the leading cause of death between 11 and 30 among S. Koreans, the results are good.
  - wenc 8y ago
    > Albeit much less competitive China I'm not sure about this. From what I've read, Chinese society is more competitive, not less.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Competing to finish in the top 3% of an arbitrary test isn’t really useful. Setting up your youth to have 97% be failures isn’t really useful.

fhood 8y ago

That sucks. And it makes me feel like maybe SATs aren't so bad. I feel like scoring well on the SAT doesn't actually require preparation, just high literacy and a willingness to think the questions through.

wenc 8y ago
Getting a high/near-perfect score on the SAT does require preparation due to time pressure. SAT candidates need to be able to arrive at the correct answer almost instinctively (mostly via pattern-matching and some reasoning). This entails practice. The material tested in the US SATs is relatively unsophisticated compared to the curricula of many East Asian countries. My understanding is that SATs test for quickness of reasoning more than anything else. (SAT subject tests go into more depth, but are still have nowhere near the coverage of East Asian exams)
- fhood 8y ago
  > Getting a high/near-perfect score on the SAT does require preparation due to time pressure. Sure, but it is completely possible to get a very high score with virtually no practice. Time constraints are an issue, but not too huge of one, so long as you are willing to trust your gut so to speak. > The material tested in the US SATs is relatively unsophisticated compared to the curricula of many East Asian countries. That is exactly why I think the SAT is superior.
  - wenc 8y ago
    > Sure, but it is completely possible to get a very high score with virtually no practice Only if you are naturally highly intelligent. Folks of above average intelligence (but not in the upper percentiles) tend to need to work at it (many do and succeed). > That is exactly why I think the SAT is superior. Only if you are interested in "g" intelligence alone as a pure metric, in which case psychometric instruments like the Advanced Raven Progressive Matrices should also be admissible. The SATs give you one metric of preparedness for college, arguably an important one. But the East Asian exams give you another: grit. It's much harder for a smart person to succeed at them without any effort. That said, I'm not condoning them since I believe the East Asian focus on exams often does go overboard and devolves into mismeasurement (i.e. how good you are at taking tests). But intelligence, measured in isolation, is not a good metric for college-readiness especially in technical fields, where you need a certain measure of grit to do well in the material. I've known stars in high school who struggled when they had to apply themselves.... when you're used to things coming easily to you all your life, it can be demoralizing to have to work at things.

qalmakka 8y ago

Things like these should make any nation ashamed of itself. This kind of pressure on a growing child can only destroy him or her, and it's no wonder why kids are killing themselves. It's like planting a ticking bomb in their heads and hoping it wouldn't explode if something goes wrong. As a highly educated person myself, I can't deny that studying, learning and improving yourselves are fundamental parts of the process of growing up and becoming a useful member of society, but it can't be done at the expense of someone's sanity, because it totally nullifies its value. Stuffing a kid of knowledge like a pâté goose stops him or her from really enjoying probably it's most critical years to the fullest, and I just can't really see this as a positive thing.

black-tea 8y ago
It could be considered a selective pressure then or, in other words, eugenics.
peterlk 8y ago
Well said. I'd also like to add that the opportunity costs of losing bright minds to suicide, burnout, backstabbing, etc. at a higher rate detracts from the argument that this might produce a more productive society. So from a central planner's perspective, this seems like a bad idea too.
dba7dba 8y ago
How do you think S. Korea transformed from THE poorest nation on the planet after 1953 end of Korean War to top 10 - 15 nation in a 65 year period? Imagine, there are still people alive who were born in the poorest nation on the planet, and now living in a nation that is ranked 15th in GDP. South Korean passport is ranked 3rd most accepted, tied with Germany and France. It wasn't because of natural resources or oil. It wasn't any modern industry that just had to recover after the war such as Germany or Japan did. South Korea had NO modern industry of any kind, higher education institution, a modern workforce, effective government agencies, etc. S. Korea was literally a hell hole of a nation in 1953. After the WTF period Koreans went through from 1910 to 1953 (after having had a 500 years long kingdom, the Chosun dynasty), South Korea just had to do what was necessary to survive. And only way they saw how was producing a workforce to be productive. And no, Montessori method was not a viable option. You don't have to be a highly educated non-Korean to see the education system is not quite right or wrong. Many highly educated and even not so highly educated people IN S. Korea know the question is valid to ask. Some want a change. Many who immigrated out of S. Korea to US and other nations list 2 reasons for leaving the nation, 1) conscription army and 2) the college entrance exam, the Suneung. But it was a system created at a time when there was no time to debate, but to act quickly to produce a workforce, just to survive as a nation. And it has delivered so far. Yes the suicides are tragic. But consider this. Far more S. Koreans have died (including newborn, young, old) from lack of basic medical care in South Korea when only select few had access to modern medical care up until 1970's, 80's. The nation and citizens couldn't pay for it, for lack of wealth, from due to lack of skills needed by a modern workforce. But now that they can afford it, a nation wide medical care system is in place. Without educating the workforce (and yes the Suneung), they wouldn't have that luxury. Easy for you to say they should be ashamed of that. I quite disagree.

mismatchpair 8y ago

Below is problem 33 of this year's English exam. For the English section of the exam, there are a total of 45 questions; 17 listening comprehension (around 25 minutes) and 28 reading comprehension questions (around 45 minutes). Imagine yourself (if you're non-Korean) trying to comprehend something like this in a completely foreign language. 33. Heritage is concerned with the ways in which very selective material artefacts, mythologies, memories and traditions become resources for the present. The contents, interpretations and representations of the resource are selected according to the demands of the present; an imagined past provides resources for a heritage that is to be passed onto an imagined future. It follows too that the meanings and functions of memory and tradition are defined in the present. Further, heritage is more concerned with meanings than material artefacts. It is the former that give value, either cultural or financial, to the latter and explain why they have been selected from the near infinity of the past. In turn, they may later be discarded as the demands of present societies change, or even, as is presently occurring in the former Eastern Europe, when pasts have to be reinvented to reflect new presents. Thus heritage is __________________. [3 points] ① about preserving universal cultural values ② a mirror reflecting the artefacts of the past ③ neither concerned with the present nor the future ④ as much about forgetting as remembering the past ⑤ a collection of memories and traditions of a society

wjossey 8y ago
It's questions like this that make me glad I don't take standardized tests anymore. When I took the GREs in 2008, I received a 480 on the verbal section (which was bad given I was applying to PhD programs), and a perfect 6/6 on the written section. I actually didn't qualify for a handful of programs, because they required ESL students to achieve 500 or greater (so I was below what a non-english speaker needs to score, and I spoke english as a first language). So, somehow I was an excellent writer, but had poor verbal skills. It's remarkable that we test people against this style of language, both domestically in the US and abroad, given the unlikeliness someone will ever stumble across this type of prose. And, if you do, you should really ask the writer why they're trying to be so convoluted in their argument.
sanxiyn 8y ago
While this is a good taste of Suneung, note that this problem is considered the most difficult one in this year's English exam. (The day after Suneung, major newspapers report the difficulty assessment of the test done by professional analysts. I read about this problem there.)

progressiveweb 8y ago

Here's an example of the type of questions that kids in the "Free Korea" faces: https://external-preview.redd.it/xL79rBC8VK4gI5lej7gFbU1priHRR9Vo2JNI_xHE83g.jpg?auto=webp&s=1ff5a38c025cb72429c40d3ebdb34b412c15cae2 https://external-preview.redd.it/xL79rBC8VK4gI5lej7gFbU1priH... This is only the tip of the iceberg. It appears that in order to force everybody on a normal distribution map, they've gone well past the original purpose of the government exams, which was originally a neo-Confucian artifact to promote egalitarianism-the idea that even peasants who pass the government exams are able to improve their social standing after a long period of caste society based on lineage. This means students aren't tested even on rote memorization or any of the necessary skills in the real world. Instead, they've become victim to the billion dollar industry of extra-cirricular cram schools. Public schools have become completely dependent on a widely unregulated cram schools because it's become impossible to come out on top when everybody is getting specialized help. You can't fault these parents either, these exams are insane and it makes sense that there is demand for extra tutoring. The biggest tragedy of this is that it's no longer egalitarian like in it's tradition, it's about who has the money and can pay for their child's education. Low middle class Korean families can't support the cost of raising a child in this hyper education focused culture with very little prouductivity other than elevating the truly gifted exam takers running the country with no experience other than from books. A big reason why in South Korea, you can commit horrible crimes and almost get a slap on the wrist because of incompetent, unexperienced judges and prosecutors who have mastered the art of climbing the Korean ladder, a giant bureaucracy that permeates through every part of Korean culture. Neo-confucianism is facing significant stress and young Koreans are undergoing social change.

slededit 8y ago
I'm not exactly used to answering these questions, but 5 seems the obvious choice here - the others being clearly unrelated. Is this really an example of the difficulty of this exam? If my answer is wrong that would indeed be ironic... I'd love to be corrected.