[Lim Woong] The national exam’s real problem isn’t multiple choice

President Lee Jae Myung has reopened a debate on Korea's multiple-choice national college entrance exam, with the National Education Commission considering constructed-response and essay questions, but columnist Lim Woong argues that changing the format will not solve the underlying problem of high-stakes ranking. Lim contends that the private tutoring market adapts to any test format, and that the real issue is the admissions design that forces fine distinctions among hundreds of thousands of students, which corrupts any assessment type. He recommends dividing the job: a national foundation exam plus university-specific assessments, and loosening the brittle idea of fairness.

President Lee Jae Myung has reopened a debate that Korea has postponed for almost three decades. He has questioned whether the multiple-choice national college entrance exam educates students or harms them, and the National Education Commission is considering constructed-response and essay questions. The aim is sensible. In an age when artificial intelligence can select an answer or produce a polished first draft in seconds, schools should shift away from knowledge-based assessment and focus on reasoning, critical thinking and something more than picking from answer choices. Yet a new format will not level the playing field because the private tutoring market simply retools itself to fit whatever test exists. Every Korean government seems to promise that its reform will cool the hagwon market, but Korean families have long figured out that a diploma from a top college is a valuable “signal”: a credential that sorts people as much as it teaches them. In Korea, education has been treated as a commodity for status, and as a ladder up. But spending one’s own money to help one’s children outpace their peers does not make parents morally suspect. Within lawful limits, that is a legitimate choice. The Korean government can curb fraud and unequal access to public resources, but it cannot legislate parental ambition away. In all fairness, there is a nice thing about multiple-choice questions. They can reward knowledge and quick thinking. Janet Mee and her colleagues at the National Board of Medical Examiners in the United States compared multiple-choice and short-answer questions on a high-stakes medical examination. The formats differed in difficulty, discrimination and time demands. Neither was a magic window into competence. That said, the deeper issue is not the item type. It is the admissions design around it. If a sound grasp of introductory calculus is necessary for collegiate science courses, a national examination can measure that baseline efficiently, fair and square. Trouble begins when a baseline test must also separate the 95.6 percentile from the 95.5. Then exam writers invent needlessly hard gatekeeper problems, whether the answer appears in a box or across two pages. Korea uses high-stakes exams, once a year, under excessive time pressure, to make decisions with lifelong consequences. That exam must produce fine distinctions among hundreds of thousands of students. Under those conditions, any format will be pushed toward ranking. There is a wealth of research showing that high-stakes tests often narrow the curriculum and push teachers toward test preparation. Replace bubbles with essays while preserving the same stakes, the same clock and the same ranking job, and the pressure will not disappear. In truth, introducing essays to a single national exam is a category mistake: The essay format will be corrupted when it serves as a high-stakes ranking instrument. Korea should therefore divide the job. The government should certify a national foundation in language, mathematics, science and civic knowledge. Universities should assess students’ skills and whether they are a good fit for their programs. Engineering, history, nursing and design need different evidence. Universities must publish their criteria, disclose outcomes and accept scrutiny, including public reports on who gets in and how those students fare. Mandating every program to use one ranking instrument is not fairness. Koreans also need to loosen a brittle idea of fairness. Fairness does not require every university to become Seoul National University or follow the same admissions formula. For example, Korea already has several excellent engineering schools, whose competition for faculty, students and research can be productive. Reputation is built over decades by professors and graduates; a government circular cannot spread it evenly across a map. The answer is careful design and public evaluation, not the fiction that one formula can serve every campus. Mission-specific public programs offer a reasonable place to act. Schools that prepare public-health physicians, tax officials, diplomats or other public servants may reserve alternative routes for applicants from small public universities, neglected regions or low-income families. Their public mission can justify criteria that differ from the programs at elite universities. This decentralized approach, however, has one important prerequisite: trusting the teachers who bear the brunt of the work of teaching our students. Yet amid the Lee administration’s reform push, one group has received too little respect. Korea praises teachers as “masters,” then treats them like worker bees carrying out decisions made by the queen: politicians and ministry officials. Japan’s abandoned attempt in 2021 to add written questions to its national admissions test offers a useful warning. When officials could not convince the public that the system was fair and workable, the plan stalled. Scoring systems and public trust are not details to settle after a presidential speech. The president should have asked what our teachers think about his reform ideas and how countries with similar social and political contexts have navigated this challenge. The final guide should be our ethos of teaching and learning. What is schooling for? I hate to admit that our public conversation about education rarely goes beyond getting children into the college of their choice. Education is not a machine to identify the best 17-year-olds. It should help young people discover interests, passions and talents that may have remained hidden. Admissions policy should reflect that larger purpose. With that purpose in mind, Korea can divide assessment by what each layer does best. A national exam can certify foundational skills, while universities assess judgment, writing and performance. Admission should not guarantee graduation, and students should be able to transfer between programs with less red tape. The goal is to make admission the start of intellectual life, not the finish line of childhood competition. These reforms should be tested and evaluated carefully to ensure they do not simply create new forms of test preparation. Korea is prosperous and institutionally mature enough to undertake such changes. The president’s task is not to pitch essay questions as a technical fix, but to explain why a confident society can preserve standards, embrace institutional variety, trust teachers and encourage students to imagine a future that no timed exam can measure. Lim Woong Lim Woong is a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Yonsei University in Seoul. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed. khnews@heraldcorp.com