Korean GPA admissions system and 'Top 10% Rule' in Texas

By Lee Kyung-man

For decades, Korea has attempted various policies to solve the problem of educational inequality. The evaluation of foreign language sections of the Korean SAT has recently been changed to absolute evaluation, to minimize the need for private tutoring. What is more, all examination subjects will soon be evaluated absolutely.

President Moon Jae-in has pledged that all “special purpose high schools” will be converted to regular high schools. However, this policy is causing great expectations and also great worries in many respects.

This article will suggest how to differentiate the Korean system and the U.S. system, by analyzing an admissions system that selects students based on GPA alone, the so-called automatic high school class admissions system used in Texas in the United States.

Texas House Bill 588, commonly referred to as the Top 10 Percent Rule, is a Texas law passed in 1997. The law provides a transition from a race-based policy known as affirmative action. The law guarantees that Texas students who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class will be guaranteed automatic admission to all state-funded universities.

The law has been blamed for keeping students who are not in the top ten percent, but who have other credentials such as high SAT scores or leadership and extracurricular experience, out of the larger “flagship” state universities, such as the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University, at College Station.

UT-Austin has argued for several years that the law has come to account for too many of its entering students, with 81 percent of the 2008 freshmen having enrolled under this law.

UT-Austin limited those students to 75 percent of entering freshmen from Texas. The University admitted the top 1 percent, the top 2 percent, and so forth until the cap is reached, beginning with the entering class in 2011.

A study by Julie Berry Cullen found that the law created a perverse incentive for students to transfer to a high school with lower-achieving peers, in order to graduate in that school's top percent.

The Korean college admission system, like that of the U.S., also consists of an early decision and a regular decision. Evaluation factors of various types of early decision systems, well known as “test optional admission”, are composed of GPA, extracurricular experience, personal essays, recommendations, and interviews.

The differences between the Korean college admissions system and that of the U.S. are as follows: First, the number of universities in Korea that have an admissions system that involves selecting only according to GPA is no more than 14 of 248. What is worse, these are low-ranked universities. Second, no national universities have an admissions system involving selection using only GPA. Third, there are six universities that consider extracurricular activities along with GPA and 25 universities that consider the base score on the Korean SAT. Fourth, only Korea University, among Korean universities that are similar to Ivy league Universities in the U.S., considers the base score of the Korean SAT and a student interview along with GPA. In addition, this school especially requires the principal’s recommendation.

In fact, the admissions systems in Korea that involve selecting only according to GPA seem to be such a system in name only. However, if we alternatively use the “Texas House Bill 588” system, known as the Top 10 Percent Rule, our students will transfer to high schools with lower-achieving peers in order to graduate in that school’s top percent. As such, the problem of educational inequality and social and economic inequality, as well, will not be solved.

Lee is an English teacher at Daewon Girls’ High School in Seoul.