A Seoul woman who constantly hounded her high school student son to come first nationwide in college entrance exams has allegedly been killed by the son, police said Thursday, illustrating the severe social fallout of the nation's obsession with educational achievement.
Police said they have sought a warrant to arrest the 18-year-old son, who is suspected of killing his mother and concealing her body within their house.
The student, whose name was withheld, allegedly killed his mother by stabbing her in the neck at their home in March, and has kept her body in her room for the past eight months, officials at Seoul's Gwangjin Police Station said.
The boy's father, who lived apart from his wife, reported his son's suspicious behavior to police after a recent visit. Police officers went to the home where they found the woman's body and took the teenager into custody for questioning.
The high school senior confessed to investigators that he had killed his 51-year-old mother in fear of harsh punishment as she had pressured and beaten him to come first among all students nationwide in the college entrance exam.
The student, who ranked about 4,000th nationwide in March's mock college entrance exams, changed his rank to read 62nd out of about 700,000 fellow third-graders. His mother was not satisfied with even his doctored national ranking and beat her son with a baseball bat, urging him to rise to the top.
According to officials, the suspect said he was afraid that his mother would find out about his fabricated report card in a visit to the school she was planning.
Despite him achieving relatively good grades, his mother was never satisfied and pressed him to earn better scores so he could enter the top law school in the nation, sometimes not feeding him or allowing him to sleep.
Experts say the tragic incident partially resulted from social pressure in a society that places high emphasis on big-name schools to achieve success. (Yonhap)
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