What is the cause of excessive private education?

“How many wrong answers enable you to get into the top SKY universities (Seoul, Korea and Yonsei University)? It is a question that teachers often at a high school in the Gangnam district known for zeal for education get in phone call from parents. The parents do not introduce themselves, not to mention their child’s, and simply ask the question. The teacher who answers the phone thinks, “He/she must be the generation who got into college based on the result of the standardized test.” However, teachers cannot give them a clear-cut answer because the frameworks of the standardized test and the Korean SAT are completely different.

Parents who are in the late 40s and mid-50s generally chose their college and major based on the scores of the standardized test. The test itself was a multiple choice test. For the generation, it is never easy to understand the standardized score, percentage and level of KSAT score results. Universities use a different percentage in calculating scores for each subject. Students who takes at least one subject in science two category are eligible for application for Seoul National University accept. This is why the perfect scorer cannot go to the med school of Seoul National University and get admitted to the med school of Yonsei University.

More Hakwons, private cram schools, in Daechi-dong, Seoul, are offering college entrance consulting services as President Moon Jae-in pledged that he would change the K-SAT to an absolute eval‎uation system from 2021 and high school records are likely to convert to an absolute eval‎uation system starting next year. The parents of ninth graders who will be the guinea pigs of the "new experiment" are said to spend hundreds of thousands won (hundreds of dollars) to get advice. It is doubtful whether they can get any silver bullet from the education consultants.

The second episode of the “Truth of College Entrance Exam,” a series with six episodes aired by EBS, gave a mock test for parents. It measured how much parents know about the ABC of the college entrance exam. On a scale of 1 to 100, the highest score was 100 and the lowest was 16. Parents who spend a lot on private education got good scores. A mother who got a low score said, “I was sorry for my child. I don’t deserve by saying that how are you going to get into college?" Parents have no choice but to resort to a consulting hakwon in a country where there are over 900 admission processes.