They were among 45 applicants across six major national universities who saw their college dreams derailed due to histories of school violence, highlighting a growing shift in how character is weighed in Korean university admissions.
Starting next year, all universities in Korea will be required to implement mandatory deductions for applicants with school violence records, regardless of the admission type. The policy shift was prompted by public backlash after it was revealed that the son of former prosecutor Chung Sun-sin — who was briefly appointed head of the National Office of Investigation in 2023 — had been transferred to another high school due to bullying but was still admitted to SNU with just a two-point deduction on the CSAT.
I mean, yeah. Normally North Korea is so irrelevant to the discussion, or it would be so absurd to suggest that we’re talking about them, that we can just exclude the territorial indicator when it’s not relevant. We don’t call Kpop “SKpop” because it’s exceedingly obvious to everyone involved that Korean culture reaching outside the peninsula is almost exclusively emanating from the south. North Korea has made itself so isolated and irrelevant that we can just forget it exists in regular discussion.