By Alex Jensen
SEOUL
Silence prevailed in South Korea on Thursday to enable hundreds of thousands of students to take an all-day exam seen as a key step towards success or failure in a country where education regularly continues late into the evening.
Officials took extensive measures to limit any distractions – traffic was blocked within a 200-meter radius of the 1,216 designated test sites nationwide and airplanes even cleared the skies during the listening portion for 25 minutes from 13:10 (06.00 Turkish time)
Businesses also allowed workers to arrive an hour later than usual to help ease rush hour traffic, according to local news agency Yonhap – while emergency services were on hand to make sure those running late could reach their test sites by the exam’s start time of 8:40 a.m.
Government data showed that registrations for the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) reached 640,621 – with the exam split into five parts: Korean, English, a second foreign language, mathematics and sciences.
Lee Jin, 13, from Osan Middle School in Seoul described the exam to the Anadolu Agency as “worrying but exciting.”
“In Korea you need a good result to get a good job,” he explained. “It’s normal for my friends to study at academies after school until 10 p.m. But some people keep going until even later, and that can start at 7 or 8 years old.”
With exams finishing at 17.00, a nervous wait is in store – by November 27 students will know whether or not they have a future at one of the prestigious Seoul universities, or a higher education in Korea’s less favored regions.
With youth unemployment - according to Statistics Korea - nearly three times as high as the national rate students would be forgiven any nerves.
