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The ruling Uri Party and the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development, in a meeting on Wednesday, vowed to do everything in their power to stop Seoul National University from setting its own in-depth essay writing test. "We'll wage an all-out war on SNU," and "The rebellion will be nipped in the bud," ruling party lawmakers thundered. Their reaction comes two days after President Roh Moo-hyun characterized SNU’s plans to set the test as "bad news.”
The 2008 university entrance formula calls for only the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) scores and a greater weighting of school transcripts to be taken into account. It was announced in October after a series of consultations between the ruling party and administration. As soon as the formula was disclosed, high school teachers and crammer experts predicted universities would eventually resort to in-depth essay writing tests, because they can trust neither the nine-grade CSAT scores nor transcripts based on the assumption that all high schools are of exactly the same quality.
If the government and ruling party failed to foresee what ordinary parents could, they should blame their own incompetence. They should not turn purple with rage at universities for their own policy blunders.
But so furious are they that they will do anything to stop SNU going ahead with the essays test, even to the point of enshrining the ban on individual university entrance tests in law. It will be interesting to see how they word the bill so as to distinguish essay tests of the insidious, policy-undermining kind from ordinary essay writing.
Legislating university entrance rules is tantamount to the National Assembly -- or the ruling party, to be exact -- arrogating the right to screen freshmen to itself. They seem to think the advocates of equality in all things will applaud them if they manage to block university entrance exams and thereby put graduates from specialized high schools at a disadvantage. If even university admittance is thus decided entirely on the grounds of political expediency, what does that portend for the future of universities and the Republic of Korea?
If we seriously want to tackle the nation's education problems, there is no alternative to improving schools. Instead, this administration fritters away time bashing the universities, leaving the urgent task of implementing a teacher evaluation system for the sake of better schooling unattended.
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