Early admissions programs to be cut down

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Early admissions programs to be cut down

The number of students recruited through early admissions programs will be trimmed, for the first time since the system was adopted in 2002.

The freshman slots reserved for early action applications will account for 64.2 percent, down 2 percent from this year, according to the Korean Council for University Education (KCUE), which announced admission guidelines for the 2014-15 academic year on Thursday.

Current 11th graders are bound to take the 2015 College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT).

The number of slots for freshmen across 198 four-year universities nationwide will be reduced to 379,107 from the 2014 academic year, which has 407 more freshmen.

As early admission seats saw a decrease, the number of freshmen accepted through regular admission rounds will increase to 35.8 percent from 33.8 percent.

The KCUE said that 89 universities will base regular admission decisions solely on CSAT scores. Those exam scores will be weighted 80 percent at 60 universities and 60 percent at 37 universities.

Twenty-nine schools this year will also increase the weight of essays in making regular admission decisions, although Seoul National University, the country’s top university, announced that it won’t factor in essay tests from the next academic year for its regular admissions round.

Interviews will be weighted more at 53 universities - 21 less than last year.

Also, institutions that administer their own exams when selecting students early will be required to post the dates and times of their tests in advance; this is to help prevent students from failing to show up for tests because they had to be present at a different school.

The KCUE also urged colleges to simplify their application methods to minimize confusion for students and parents.

The order is in line with the government’s efforts to streamline the CSAT test for the convenience of parents and students.

To this end, the Ministry of Education announced earlier this year that colleges will face stricter scrutiny and regulations if they widen admissions standards.

Universities are currently divided into three groups to discourage students from applying to too many schools at once in the regular admission round. Each applicant is only permitted to apply to one school in each group.

Group A is composed of 139 universities, while Group B has 154 universities, and group C has 152 universities. Seoul National University has moved into Group A, and Yonsei and Korea universities changed to Group B. The application period for regular admission begins at the end of December.

Along with the guidelines by the council, another important factor in major Korean universities’ admissions system is SNU’s admissions rules.

The prestigious university said earlier this year that it will accept high school students from liberal arts programs into its engineering and medical departments from 2015 in order to cultivate more well-rounded talent.

Korea’s high school system is split into two tracks - liberal arts and general science - and courses in each division are based around that sequence. Until now, liberal arts students - who don’t take a science segment on the college entrance exam - have largely been barred from applying for science- and engineering-related majors.

In a departure from the current system, SNU will allow humanities students to apply for programs in the architecture and industrial engineering departments in the 2014-15 academic year as part of a trial run, with a plan to expand that policy to the college of medicine, veterinary and dentistry and other natural science and engineering divisions in 2015-16.

SNU’s new admissions rules are considered a benchmark for other universities, and prestigious institutes such as Yonsei and Korea will likely follow suit or at least take into account the change when drafting their own admissions policies in the future.


BY PARK EUN-JEE [ejpark@joongang.co.kr]
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