1 in 4 Korean high school students sleep in class: report
A notice calling for silence is posted in a hallway outside a third-year classroom at Hyowon High School in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, May 7, during a National Joint Scholastic Achievement Test. Newsis
Korean high school students have one of the lowest long-term absenteeism rates among OECD countries, but their actual classroom participation remains in question, with more than one in four students admitting to sleeping during class, a recent report showed.
The findings suggest that schools are struggling to function as places of learning, as classes remain heavily geared toward college entrance exams and fixed curricula. The report called for changes to class material, teaching methods and student assessment standards.
According to the report published by the Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI) on Thursday, Korea recorded the lowest rate of long-term absenteeism among OECD countries.
Korea’s rate also stood at 2 percent when the Programme for International Student Assessment measured students who had been absent from school for more than three months in 2022. The rate averaged 7.6 percent among the other countries surveyed.
The low absenteeism rate, however, did not mean students were fully engaged in class, the report found.
KEDI distinguished attendance from participation, defining attendance as students’ physical presence at school and participation as their behavioral, emotional and cognitive involvement in classroom activities. By doing so, the institute found “a growing gap between quantitative attendance and qualitive participation.”
The report categorized Korean high school students’ withdrawal from classroom participation into three types: behavioral disengagement, in which students are present in the classroom but do not participate in lessons; emotional disengagement, in which students no longer see classes as meaningful learning experiences; and institutional disengagement, in which students decide that staying in school does not help their college entrance prospects and instead turn to other routes, such as the qualification exam or the regular admissions track.
Behavioral disengagement had already been captured last year in a Ministry of Education survey on what is actually happening in classrooms. Some 27.3 percent of high school students said they sleep during class, while another 19.2 percent said they engage in activities unrelated to lessons.
Schools’ core role as places of learning also appeared to have been partly displaced by private academies. A 2025 survey found that 75.7 percent of high school students received private education, spending an average of 7.1 hours per week on it.
Min Yoon-kyung, the author of the paper, said the policy goal should expand from keeping students in school to helping them learn and mature there.
“Evaluation systems, including school records and the College Scholastic Ability Test, should be reformed so that they show students’ growth rather than simply producing relative rankings. Universities should also diversify their admissions methods so that different dimensions of student growth can be reflected,” Min said.
Educational authorities should also add a new metric to education statistics to measure whether students are actually participating in learning at school, she added.
This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.