By Jung Min-ho
A group of students who received lower scores at last year’s college entrance exams because of an erroneous question will sue the education ministry for compensation.
Three lawyers are preparing a lawsuit against the Ministry of Education over the incorrect world geography question in last year’s annual College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT), lawyer Lim Yoon-tae said Monday.
With the ministry deciding to recalculate CSAT scores to show all exam-takers got the question right, all of the 18,884 test-takers who had “wrong” answers could possibly sue the ministry for compensation.
The number of plaintiffs at this point is unknown, but Lim revealed that he expects many more students to join the lawsuit.
This came after a recent ruling by the Seoul High Court in favor of test-takers whose grades were affected by the erroneous question.
Lim said each plaintiff is expected to ask for 2 to 3 million won ($1,800 to $2,800) in compensation.
This is first incident of this kind since the test was introduced back in 1994. College entrance results, which have already been finalized, will change because of the faulty question.
However, experts say that students, who believe they failed to make it to the colleges they initially wanted because of the wrong question, are not expected to get a second chance since the exam score is just one of many factors for admission.
In response, the ministry will seek to set up a special law with the National Assembly by February to establish legal grounds for the victimized test-takers to be admitted into colleges in addition to the original quotas.
The question which has caused the controversy asked about comparing the gross domestic products of the EU and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) members. While the “right” answer as written in textbooks said that of the EU was larger than NAFTA, the test-takers claimed that NAFTA's has been larger than the EU's since 2010 and the question did not specify the base year.