Yesterday was the day for almost 700,000 Korean high school students to take the nearly 9-hour long College Scholastic Ability Test. Given only once a year, it is critical to gaining admission to a Korean university. Coupled with the fact that more than 80% of Korean high school seniors attend university, this is a critical event. High school students spend months preparing, and their families often go to churches and temples to pray for a good outcome. To help manage the logistics, work started an hour late yesterday to minimize traffic jams, and aircraft were diverted from flying near test sites to minimize noise disruptions. In past years, the power company has even placed crews on standby in case the power grid would somehow become disrupted and impact testing.

While we often think of testing as a Western phenomenon, standardized tests have been used in Asia for over 2000 years. Indeed, the concept of using tests to hire civil servants was first implemented in the West in the late 1800s when the British began following testing practices they first observed in China.

Reid Klion