"Problems High School Students Can't Solve Assigned"... KAIST, Hanyang University, and Konyang University Ordered to Correct

Violation of the 'Gonggyoyuk Jeongsanghwa Act'... Total of 6 Items

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Hanyang University, and Konyang University were found to have included university-specific exam questions beyond the scope of the high school curriculum in the 2023 academic year admissions, resulting in corrective orders from the Ministry of Education.

On the 26th, the Ministry of Education announced that it finalized corrective orders for three universities that violated the "Special Act on the Promotion of Normalization of Public Education and Regulation of Preceding Education" among those that conducted university-specific exams in 2023, and notified the results. The violating universities must submit a report on the implementation plan for recurrence prevention measures to the Ministry of Education by September this year.

According to the Public Education Normalization Act, universities conducting university-specific exams such as essay and oral tests must comply with the scope and level of the high school curriculum. To verify compliance, the Center for Prevention of Preceding Education at the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, composed of current high school teachers and others, reviewed whether 2,067 questions from 58 universities that conducted university-specific exams in the relevant academic year adhered to the high school curriculum. Based on this, the Ministry of Education notified each university of the legal violations and, after an objection process, issued corrective orders.

If a university violates the related law for two consecutive years, part of its admission quota may be suspended. All three universities in this case were first-time violators and received only corrective orders. Yonsei University violated the Public Education Normalization Act for two consecutive years in the 2017 academic year, and KAIST did so in the 2020 academic year.

The problematic questions this time totaled six: five were oral interview questions and one was an essay question. At Konyang University, one English question was found beyond the high school curriculum scope in the medical field university-specific exam; at KAIST, two math questions and two science questions; and at Hanyang University, one math question in the business field was confirmed to be outside the high school curriculum scope.

Over the past three years, most questions confirmed to violate the law were from science-related fields. Among the 18 questions detected from 2021 to 2023, there were zero Korean language or social studies questions, while six math questions and seven science questions were found to be outside the high school curriculum scope.

Oh Seok-hwan, Vice Minister of Education, stated, "To prevent university-specific exams from causing excessive advanced learning and private education, we will continuously build consensus with universities through training for university admissions officers and strictly enforce relevant laws against violating universities."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.