Exam testing informs every aspect of life in South Korea, and it doesn’t stop even after you’ve finished university

Last Thursday was test day in South Korea. Traffic stopped. Airplane schedules were altered. The military was told to shut up. The best rice cakes in the land were distributed, consumed, and most likely thrown up in anxiety. For nine hours, the universe froze.

The most stressful test of my life was my fourth-year university Anglo-Saxon exam, which required me to translate a chunk of the original text of Beowulf, and for which I studied hard for maybe three days. The stress stemmed primarily from my desire to protect my ego by way of my final average; ultimately, the exam meant nothing.

In South Korea, tests determine the outcome of every major event in your life, and the nationwide university entrance exam (officially, the “College Scholastic Ability Test”), which takes place annually on the third Thursday in November, is the mother of all tests — the doorway through which kids must pass to transform from mute, bespectacled children whose personality is subsumed by their identical school uniforms into burgeoning adults who can wear and drink and study what they want.

It also determines their future job prospects, and by extension, where they are likely to end up in the rigidly organized strata of Korean social relations. Because of this, the One Test holds power over kids’ lives in much the same way as Sauron’s One Ring did over the orcs of Mordor — it haunts them, compels them, terrifies them, and bends them to its will. If they don’t obey, they’re liable to end up with poor job prospects, which will in turn affect their marriage prospects and the futures of their children, and put them in danger of living in a state of perpetual failure, possibly in a dark cave in the Misty Mountains where they will spend their time wheezing and sucking on rotten fish.

The kicker is, the testing doesn’t stop even once you’ve passed the exam, made it through university and graduated with a full degree. Last year, a friend of mine applied for a job with the Jeju government, to work for the marketing arm of its tourism department. Before she even had an interview, she was required to write a test that covered law, English and the entirety of Korean history — which, as Wikipedia tells us, “stretches from Lower Paleolithic times to the present,” meaning my friend was responsible for covering roughly 2.5 million years of recorded time, for just one section of the test. This was supposedly intended to gauge how qualified she is to tell people that Jeju has nice beaches and a funny erotic sculpture park and good raw squid soup.

My friend’s situation was not at all unusual. To prepare for her test, she moved to Seoul, canceled her phone, quit life and spent all of her time at a giant “cramming hagwon” where she attended classes taught on closed-circuit TV to thousands of people in the exact same boat. These schools exist for both civil service examinations and the university entrance exam, and the rigorous study schedule they demand students adhere to is punishing, surreal, even dystopian.

No one seems to like living within a system that places test scores above all else in judgments of intelligence, or whether or not someone is suitable for a particular position, especially when the content of the tests have little to do with the job or position in question. There is statistical evidence to show that the pressure of the One Test messes kids up something fierce; among Koreans aged 10 to 19, suicide is the second most common cause of death, behind only traffic accidents, and since Korean kids have little in their lives outside of schooling — certainly, almost none of the rebellious, stormy teen angst that fuels teen suicide in North America — test-related stress is surely the prime culprit. In an article about cram schools published last August in the New York Times, the headmaster of Jongro, a large hagwon in Yongin near Seoul, admitted that the place, “metaphorically speaking… is a prison,” although one teacher at the school pointed out that the situation is better now than it used to be; girls and boys still aren’t allowed to touch or talk about anything except their studies, but at least they no longer have barbed wire and severe beatings to contend with.

When I first began teaching at an English hagwon, I tried to emphasize to my kids that tests aren’t everything — that education is also about creativity and flexible thinking and communication and empathy. But I gave up when I realized that, in a way, I was lying. For them, tests are everything, and convincing them otherwise requires getting them to step outside a mindset that’s held up by thousands of years of culture. Numbers are quintessentially important for Koreans. As a person nearing their thirties, I might like to make the somewhat facile statement that age is simply a state of mind, but in Korea it is a concrete quantity, and must be, because it determines a whole slew of things about how to behave, speak, eat and drink in relation to other people. Even when a kid is mere months younger than their friend, if there’s a numerical year separating them, they use the terms hyoeng or nuna (used by boys to refer to his elder brother or sister, respectively), oppa or eonni (used by girls for the same purpose). More than once, I’ve been confused when someone has told me about their brother — “is he your real brother?,” I ask. They say no. I say, “Oh, a friend.” No, they say — older brother. Age gives people a slot in the social structure, and if it gets muddled or abstracted, they do, too.

The situation is similar with scholastic assessment and achievement. For me, trying to get my students to be creative is important, but for them, it’s a foreign idea, a vagary that leads to no definite rank with which to situate themselves in the insanely competitive education system and, subsequently, the country’s workplace and society.

Whether or not it’s a good way to go about things — and most of my students and Korean friends agree it’s not — is beside the point. If you’re thinking about stuff like that, it means you’re not studying, which means you’re screwed. I like this quote, also taken from the Times article, from a Korean accountant, which sums up both the pervasive attitude towards testing and just how fundamental numbers are in Korean thinking: “In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person’s future. It’s a sad reality. But you have to acknowledge it; otherwise you hurt your children’s future.”