ed Easier English exam

Korean parents who recently saw the English tests for college entrance must have been surprised at their level of difficulty. Even college graduates might find it hard to understand some sample sentences. It must take enormous struggle ― and near prohibitive tuition ― for high school students to reach that level of proficiency.

So Education Minister Hwang Woo-yea is right ― in principle ― to try to make the English exam of College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) easier by shifting from the current relative grading system to an absolute one.

“We cannot demand K-12 students to become like English scholars or experts,” said Hwang who was sworn in a few weeks ago. “It is also doubtful what results the decades of English investment and outgrown private tutoring market have produced.” He couldn’t be more right.

The unduly difficult English exam has only one purpose: to set most proficient students ― 4 percent of total test-takers ― apart from the rest.

But the lowered difficulty in English tests is likely to result in at least two problems. First, given that universities will try to grade applicants in any way, the schools are likely to force them to undergo their own English exams, far more difficult than the state exam. Second, the easier test in English will make other subjects, such as math and Korean, more difficult, swelling private education markets for them.

As long as schools stick to student selection by test scores, making one subject easier will go nowhere. The solution therefore will be to lower the overall difficulty of the CSAT, reduce the importance it plays in the admissions process, and fill the void with high school records and other abilities. Going further, the nation will have to think until when its education system should focus on producing test-taking robots based on rote memorization instead of developing different merits and potentials of students.

Any policy change should be based on such a fundamental, long-term and large plan for education reform. Hwang’s decision seems to be not the case, as it came a few days after President Park Geun-hye stressed the need “to normalize English education” and reduce private tutoring costs of nearly 15 trillion won ($15 billion) a year.

One can’t blame the President. Pre-school English education has moved to pre-natal level, and universities judge professors’ ability less by their scholastic width and depth than by their ability to deliver lectures in English, or what the school authorities say as “native” language. The Korean media is filled with stories of “English geniuses” ― an actress and a former announcer who mastered vocabulary with some new-found memorizing skills, as well as a comedian who have come to talk with native speakers after watching American dramas for months.

We hope the government will set right the excessive, and misguided, fervor in learning English and overall education. That may be difficult, however, in part because President Park herself seems to spend lots of time on memorizing quotable expressions in as diverse foreign languages as possible.