No. 2 Pencils Ready

At 9:10am today throughout all of Korea, 6th graders were told to begin the National Assessment of Educational Achievement exam.*  

For 4 periods they will sit and be tested on materials they have learned since the 4th grade.  Their knowledge of Korean, social studies, math, science and English will all come down to which bubble they mark with their pencils. 

And while they suffer, labor and worry over their performance on the exam, I'm just hanging out.

According to the Korean Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE) the purpose** of the test is to:

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  • To diagnose the educational achievements of elementary, middle and high school students and the trends of their achievements.
  
  
  • To provide fundamental reference data for improving the National Curriculum by analyzing the degrees of students' achieving educational goals of the curriculum.
  
  
  • To improve the teaching and learning methods and produce basic data used to set up a learning encouragement policy by analyzing assessment items and the relationships between contextual variables and academic achievement.
  
  
  • To provide schools with exemplary assessment methods.
  
  
  • To employ and distribute the use of current research design and methods such as trend analysis and standard setting.
  
  
  
  

But all Korean teachers know the test is just a lot of stress and work, and that the government will ultimately use the results to rank the schools and give awards to the principals of those schools that perform the best.

Poor little mini-humans being put to work for the benefit of others.  I mean, I'm not complaining, Tuesdays are my worst day!  Thanks for the downtime monsters! ^^

 

*9th graders were also tested.  The content of their exams was similar to that of the 6th graders, but materials ranged from what they had learned between grades 7-9th.

**this information is from a 2009 report, no newer materials were listed on KICE's website.