Survivors from one of South Korea’s worst maritime disasters yesterday were among hundreds of thousands of high-school students across the country who sat the high-pressure annual college entrance exam.
Preparation for the crucial exam starts from elementary school, and the relentless pressure to score well has been blamed for everything from early burnout to teenage depression and suicide.
More than 630,000 students yesterday turned out for the exam and, as happens every year, the entire country went into hush-mode for the duration.
The extraordinary measures taken to ensure nothing affects the student’s concentration include a 35-minute suspension of all aircraft takeoffs and landings at South Korean airports to coincide with the main language listening test.
The exam is a stressful rite of passage for any student — but for none more so this year then several dozen students from Danwon High School in Ansan, south of Seoul.
In April last year, 325 of the school’s students were on an organized trip to the southern island of Jeju when the passenger ferry they were in sank.
Only 75 of them survived.
Most of the surviving students were in the same grade and took part in yesterday’s exam — seen off at the test centers by their anxious parents.
“After what happened, she became quite withdrawn and shunned people, as well as her studies,” Jang Dong-won, 46, said of his daughter. “But she somehow pulled herself out of it, and ended up hitting the books hard, staying late at school to study with her classmates.”
The survivors were offered a dispensation to apply to colleges without taking the exam, but most declined, despite the difficulties they had getting back into the grueling study routine the test demands.
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