Seoul Superintendent of Education Jeong Geun-sik proposed to the political world to transition school internal assessments and the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) to absolute evaluation. Superintendent Jeong noted on the 13th that he will officially propose a '10 major educational pledges to realize cooperative education for opening the future' that includes this content to all political parties.
Superintendent Jeong argued for changing the current school internal assessment system, which combines absolute and relative evaluations to absolute evaluation, to normalize public education and reduce private education expenses. He also suggested transitioning the current CSAT system, which calculates grades on a 9-point relative evaluation scale aside from English and Korean history, to absolute evaluation.
Superintendent Jeong said, 'While the high school curriculum is elective, the CSAT subject system is integrated, causing a mismatch,' and noted that 'this undermines the intent of increasing students' learning choice and burden.'
He added, 'The current CSAT evaluation method, which is centered on elective items, has limitations as an assessment tool for creativity, problem-solving abilities, or convergent thinking, which are emphasized for future capabilities,' and stated, 'Both the internal assessment and CSAT systems should be converted to a single absolute evaluation system.'
He also mentioned that the time for rolling admissions and regular admissions should be integrated in January, resulting in changing the criteria date for school life records that can be used for rolling admissions from the end of August to the end of December.
Superintendent Jeong further suggested redesigning the method of teacher allocation so that local education offices can autonomously determine the scale of hiring temporary teachers outside the regular quota, reflecting the policy characteristics of the high school credit system.
Regarding the discussions about reducing local government finance in light of the declining school-age population, he argued that the current level (20.79% of the national tax) should be maintained, and that it should be legislated to ensure stable educational finance.
Additionally, he proposed ▲guaranteeing teachers' basic political rights and amending laws related to the protection of teachers' rights such as child abuse punishment law, child welfare law, and teacher status law ▲developing a roadmap for improving aging school facilities ▲expanding support for exchanges between urban and rural students ▲legislation for the establishment of a national learning diagnosis and growth support center to ensure basic academic abilities ▲deploying professional counselors to support the mental health of students and teachers.