I'm writing this imagining parents as my audience rather than students. What prompted me was a post I happened across on a site called Ppomppu, by someone who said they were a private high school teacher (If you have children, be sure to send them to a private high school. - Ppomppu (ppomppu.co.kr)); that post seemed to explain admissions only in terms of writing the school record, so I want to point out the changes in big, rough strokes. For reference, this is not a piece arguing that government policy ought to change this way. These are simply facts you can readily learn from all the documents floating around; but in any industry, no matter how much information is out there, I feel it's hard to take an interest and actually read it, so I'm writing it down like this. I could film a video too, but I'm a person in my early thirties who's still more comfortable with writing, so I'm doing it this way. I might post a video later if I think it over more and gather more material.
1) The immediate admissions (~2024, 2025, 2026)
The reason I set the immediate admissions as a three-year span is that the high school seniors of 2023 are the 2024 cycle, and students who become first-years this year face the 2026 cycle. For the regular track (jeongsi), you just need to do well on the CSAT, so there's plenty of information if you look up how to study for or take it well. So I won't explain it separately. One important point is that universities have decided to reflect school grades again in the regular track too (from the 2024 cycle). It's becoming time to be careful about throwing away your GPA entirely. Please pay attention to your school grades as well.
For the early track (susi), even as information about the comprehensive screening (hakjong) accumulates, I get the sense that parents themselves still lack information. Surely the parents who come to me have looked into it, so I don't quite understand why the information is so lacking. For example, even when I counsel parents of top-tier students (GPA in the mid-1s, mock exams in the low-2s), perhaps because they're not specialists in the field, they often don't say anything about what to do with the detailed contents of the school record. They simply hold the wish to send their child to a good university. So let me touch on the early track a bit.
The early track still has many possible cases; let me add a little to the explanations in the Ppomppu post.
1)) The early-track screening called 'subject record' (hakgyobu gyogwa) simply requires extremely high school grades. The closer you converge on the 1s, the wider the range of opportunities. Subject record looks at nothing but the numbers. The proportion of high-scoring students per school is already fixed, right? So this isn't the teacher's domain. There are cases where performance assessments serve as the differentiator, but you can prepare for that area by choosing high school courses in a direction that screens it out as much as possible.
2)) The essay (nonsul) screening simply requires writing extremely well, on the premise of meeting the 'minimum grade cutoff.' But such essays mostly demand reasoning ability, so you have to be sharp on current affairs and have the power to read new texts. Naturally, you'd need to have read a lot, right? But these days it's a generation based on video media, so while you'd think such students would be few, there are in fact quite a number. Those are the students who pass the essay track. Preparing for the essay, put simply, means writing and reading a lot — but do today's students like that? Because it's so different from their lives, the level of preparation of the students who prepare is low, and their number is not large. The number admitted is also small.
3)) The overseas-Korean track only requires a record of having lived abroad for a long time. But if that were the case, you wouldn't be reading this.
4)) The problematic 'comprehensive screening.' The quality of the 'record' has to be high. And that area is the teacher's domain. You may regard it as admissions essentially moved by the teacher's hand. So how is that record composed? There are so many possible cases that it's hard to organize, but if I lay it out as I see it, on a horizontal line:
----ㅣ--------------------------------ㅣ----
Teacher's discretion (100) Student's request (100)
It's structured along a model like this. The teacher might write the entire school record, and these days students sometimes get consulting and write the subject-competency special notes themselves, handing them to the teacher and saying 'please write it like this' — so rather than there being clear options, there's a difference of degree in how much is reflected. In that case, if admissions matter to you as a parent, what you must do is make the homeroom teacher your 'ally.'
Whether the school-record content that students bring after getting consulting is perfect from a teacher's viewpoint — no, it isn't. In my case, since I'm a homeroom teacher and can see all of a student's prior records, it's relatively easy for me to judge whether the contents of individual subjects, autonomous activities, and career-related special notes form a harmonious whole; but from a student's or parent's viewpoint, checking this isn't easy. Unless you're an expert, how would you look at the die of an M1 chip and know this is RAM and this is the GPU? You can't easily tell whether this school record is code that's all headers, or code in which various internal pieces harmonize so that no back-end work is needed. So from a parent's viewpoint, if the homeroom teacher isn't on your side, it's hard even to gauge whether the record is being done properly or not.
If it isn't being done properly, you'd best abandon early the idea that filing a complaint will solve the problem, because once a complaint circulates, no matter how hard you try to contain it, rumors about which student's complaint it was will get around. And then teachers' writing tends to go in the direction of avoidance rather than writing well.
From the standpoint of a senior-year homeroom teacher / the school, the universities that work to send students in via the comprehensive screening are the Seoul-area universities. If you go to those Seoul universities' admissions offices, you'll find a document called the Comprehensive Screening Guidebook. Download those documents, read them several times, and pack the school record neatly with the recurring vocabulary, competencies, and abilities — then it becomes a decent school record. To name a few common directions, every university emphasizes things like 'convergent thinking / critical thinking / problem-solving / self-directed learning ability / cooperative ability and community spirit / valuing and practicing social responsibility.' But usually the subject-competency content students bring after consulting focuses only on the individual's 'learning ability,' so the others are missing. Such records should naturally be avoided, right? In the typical parent's situation it's hard to discern this, so it would be good if the homeroom teacher discerned it for you...
Lastly, one means of proving a student's initiative is 'whether they completed joint / additional courses.' Joint courses or additional courses are courses taken additionally during after-school hours on weekdays or during vacations. At the start / end of each semester the school takes applications for joint and additional courses. They're often relayed through the homeroom teacher, and even if it's not a subject related to your aspirations, the more you take, the better, because it appears on the school record separately marked as 'additional course / joint course,' which is very good.
For example, a science-focused school (I won't explain it here; if you search online and still don't understand, leave a comment) will open courses like Advanced Physics / Advanced Chemistry as joint / additional courses and will likely have top-tier students in related fields take them — because this creates an advantageous point in the comprehensive screening.
To summarize, there are two things you can prepare for the comprehensive screening.
1) The student's ability and attitude: ability in subjects, attitude toward teachers, attitude toward fellow students (selfish students can never get good evaluations).
2) The parent's ability and attitude: a good relationship with a good teacher (this too fails if the teacher is a poor one), and understanding of and preparation for the comprehensive screening.
If your grades look borderline, preparing the comprehensive screening may be a good approach; if you're sharp, CSAT prep may be good. The best is to prepare everything. You never know how life will turn out, right?
2) The next admissions (after 2027)
I don't know if you happened to catch Minister Lee Ju-ho's interview; some of you may have heard talk of CSAT changes and the introduction of the IB, but assuming you don't know, in simple terms:
1)) IB education
If you search 'IB' in English you'll get 'International Baccalaureate.' In short, the school's curriculum becomes the object of evaluation. How do you evaluate a school's curriculum? How do we evaluate companies? If you think about it, schools too will soon have evaluation criteria established. It's not yet clear what will count as a good school, but since what the IB demands is generally far from the CSAT, I'm also thinking that going the IB route may be more related to students' happiness. Of course, we'll have to see. Instead, there may or may not be a nationwide standardized exam (CSAT).
2)) Descriptive (essay-style) CSAT
Talk of a descriptive CSAT has already been designated as a research project since the Moon Jae-in administration, so going to the national policy research site and looking it up may help too. In any case, a reform of the admissions system is planned. The Ministry of Education or the government hasn't yet announced concrete information, so it's hard to speak readily, but in my case I naturally regard a descriptive CSAT as 'all but inevitable in the future.'
3) Employment via vocational high schools
1) You've heard that public-institution hiring quotas are being cut, right? During this administration that will surely be the case, so for the time being it may be better to avoid the vocational-high-school-to-public-institution high-school-graduate special hire — but this is a matter of choice. The vocational high schools near the school where I work sent about 7% of a graduating class into public institutions / public enterprises this year too (via high-school-graduate special hiring). As with the CSAT, the public-institution hiring area is also fine if you can be in the top 4% of the entire applicant pool.
0) Finally...
I'll answer questions you have. There's no need to say 'choose a private school' like the Ppomppu post, because I see it as a matter of the school's / teacher's discretion. I don't think private schools are more excellent for being private, nor public schools more lacking for being public. But there clearly are differences in competence among individual teachers.
In my case, I'm involved in writing the entire-subject school record of a top student in my class. That's because, from the second year on, you just have to put the competencies, abilities, and attitudes that their target major requires — and that the university requires — into the special notes of every subject and into the autonomous / career / club records. Of course it takes a lot of effort, but I do it because I think I can. Whether there are many people up for this, I don't know.
P.S. There are also cases where students write special notes in the form of 'case studies'; if you want to find good or recent cases for those, please refer to the national policy research site to help with case selection. It's true that a student's admissions outcome changes in proportion to the quality and quantity of the parents' attention.
Good luck, parents.
P.S.2. The admissions of the far, far future (raising your children)
Let me recommend two games that can greatly help build reasoning / logical thinking. It's even better if you play together.
1) Zoombinis: a game you can't progress in without inferring rules. Rather than having toddlers play other apps, I think having them play this is the best.
Zoombinis on the App Store (apple.com) (Apple App Store link)
Zoombinis - Apps on Google Play (Google Play link)
2) Mini Metro / Mini Motorways
Mini Motorways on the App Store (apple.com) (Motorways isn't on Google, but it's on Apple and Steam.)
Mini Metro - Google Play app (Mini Metro is on Google / Steam / Apple.)
You might wonder why this is a reasoning game, but if you can't reason about and connect the symbols, the game won't progress.
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