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Comment by ken47 | Hacker News Reader

This test seems to control your trajectory in Korean society to a very high degree, which seems like overkill in my view, because a test can only be so reflective of real-life skills. I have a family member who did very well on the test and got into Seoul National University, which is reputed to be the best university in Korea. According to them, their IQ is "only" 120-130, but they have very good memory, and are able to study endlessly without tiring. Are those useful skills? Yes, for many things, but not for everything.

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Korea has a long history (along with China) on using tests to determine your place in society. Korea's version of the civil service examinations (known as the gwageo) have been around for like a milleniun, and it was pretty much your only way into the middle and upper class of society. The university entrance exams is just the modern cultural continuation of it.

Which is why Korea has historically spent an inordinate proportion of its intellectual capital trying to pass an exam rather than innovating. Modern Korea is much better than that, but there is still room for improvement.

Sometimes it seems like half the stuff I own is from Korea. I’d say they’re innovating just fine.

Standardized testing does not aim to be a perfect evaluation, it aims to be a good enough evaluation that can be made highly resistant to corruption/bribery relative to its qualitative alternatives.

They could divide it into 5-10 different test, administered over the course of several years. Anything but what they are doing now, which sounds like it was custom designed to encourage drug abuse and suicide.

Can you write out the detailed arguments as to how that would be a net benefit?

For a start, you don't permanently mess up your life if you are sick/distracted by personal issues for that one exam.

You need to factor in all pros and cons in order to arrive at a net positive or negative in the first place.

now your stress is over several years, and if you fail an early one, what motivation do you have to keep on going?

plus as children / young adults, many are still developing so you want to push testing as late as possible

The stress is distributed over time, so lower peak stress, and for those who are not cut out for this, they will find out much more quickly, which minimizes their time wasted studying. They could invest their times instead into a trade school etc., which will be of greater benefit to society.

Is it pass/fail? I figure if you fuck up on one test then you have several others to look forward to and improve. And each individual test could be more focused, so easier to study for. Just have a test at the end of every year from ~13-18 instead of one ultra-test that makes or breaks your entire existence. Sounds dystopian. And also completely detached form how reality works. Unless you're in the Olympics, no one cares how you perform once. They care about how you perform and will perform over months and years.

Drug abuse is rare and severely punished. You go to prison if you're Korean, you did drugs recently and got caught in Korea. It doesn't matter if you've smoked pot overseas, flew back to Korea, got tested and the drug test came out positive. They'll still throw you in prison.

When do they test you?

It's mostly illegal to purchase in the first place iirc.

Random tests at the airport for instance, or more recently when you enroll for military service, as all males are required to.

The "resourceful youth" have to deal with a competitive environment, highschool bullying, exams, so they have a lot to do.

Prison sentence for drug use is up to 5 years.

I highly doubt the resourceful youth of Korea have not discovered several ways to find and abuse stimulants to help them study.

Just curious, what is the average prison sentence in Korea for a 16-year old found guilty of buying Adderall online?

Six months of time and >$1.5m gone from lifetime earnings? Definitely needs clarification from Korean guys, though.

Unless you're a celebrity, in which case you get "special treatment."

And they say drug prohibition can’t work.

100% agree There's a simple statistical argument behind it: the variance drops as you increase the number of tests.

Let's say your true ability is A and you have one measurement M1. The variance (or, let's put it in another way: the probability that your M1 is waaaay different from your A) goes down if you also get M2, M3, M4 and take an average.

In other words: your measurements become more precise and the stress goes down a lot

One could say that grades are an even better metric! They measure all manner of academic topics over many years and across many different instructors.

Only if the grades are assigned in a standardized manner across all candidates, which they definitely are not.

Taking four independent samples isn’t the same as taking one sample and cutting it into four.

Happiness index for Korea is 6 Happiness index for US is 6.9

Suicide rate in Korea is 21.2 per 100k Suicide rate in US is 14.5 per 100k

Drug death rate in Korea is 0.16 per 100k Drug death rate in US is 18.83 per 100k

And I only did the US and Korea because I only know the US. My conclusion is South Koreans feel about the same as Americans but do way less drugs.

Having the same suicide rate as the US is not indicative of a healthy culture, especially in a country without easy access to guns.

It’s not even remotely the same, it’s nearly 50% higher than the US (which isn’t doing that great either).

South Korea has the 10th highest suicide rate in the world.

On the flip side, how much as South Korean society managed to advance in the 50 years compared to “happy America?”

Other countries have managed economic miracles without mass suicidal tendencies.

Plus, that explosive growth has ended. South Korea escaped poverty and now its growth rate is comparable to western countries with much better suicide rates.

The US government gave South Korean manufacturers access to the US market as part of the US strategy to fight the Cold War. Would South Korea have been able to get rich fast without that access?

You can hardly compare growth between economies in extremely different development stages directly.

Also the gap between Korea has remained constant since the 90s (in fact it even widened over the last 15 years or so)

> how much as South Korean society managed to advance in the 50 years compared to “happy America?”

It's apples and oranges. Compared to the U.S., how much did western Europe and Japan advance in the half-century preceding 2000, relative to where they started in 1945?

It’s not apples and oranges. America was far more prosperous than South Korea or Japan in 1945. But it didn’t get that way by being happy.

I think you missed my point: In 1945, western Europe and Japan were largely in ruins, so they could rebuild with then-modern technology and not be held back by the curse of the installed base.

(What have you got against being happy?)

Isn't SAT tests in US exactly the same as the Korean system?

The Korean test is significantly more difficult, if for no other reason, it takes significantly more time than the SAT to complete. Also, the maximum question difficulty is said to be much harder.

I don't see why there won't be a test taking arms race with SAT tests, that happened in all of CJK countries - the test has to have a dynamic range, and it's going to be golden tickets for upper middle classes, so it's going to be heavily gamed, and so the difficulty must monotonically grow to match.

That you can take SAT tests multiple times as pointed out in sibling comment, that could change the dynamic but doesn't seem like a fundamental change, I think there is still the path for "the test" to become such.

You can take the SAT as many times as you want and only submit your best score, so the pressure isn't the same.

Or, like me, you can completely abscond from the test and still achieve

This is not a criticism on standardized testing per se. But the methodology could use a serious upgrade in the 21st century.

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