South Korea's Education Ministry said it will conduct a full review of the college application system after an outage left some students unable to file for early admissions. The ministry plans to announce specific remedy procedures for affected applicants, but disputes over fairness of opportunity are expected to continue.
The ministry issued an explanatory statement on the 12th on the errors in the early admissions application system, saying it would "pursue measures to prevent a recurrence and a full review of the application system so that similar cases do not happen again," according to education officials on the 13th. "We take very seriously the inconvenience and distress caused to students and parents by the system failure at Uway Apply," the ministry said, adding that it would "thoroughly investigate the cause, the actual conditions and the steps taken regarding the Uway Apply system failure, as well as the application system as a whole."
The ministry also said it is "working with the Korean Council for University Education to swiftly prepare remedies so that students who were unable to complete their applications because of the system failure are not disadvantaged," and that it would "provide details on the remedy procedures and methods on the 13th."
According to the council, an error occurred in the application system of Uway Apply, the agency handling early admissions filings, at about 5:50 p.m. on the 11th, leaving some students unable to complete their applications and payments. The council pushed the filing deadline back by an hour, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., but some students are protesting that the extension undermined the fairness of application opportunities among candidates.
Many students check competition ratios at each university until just before the deadline and revise their application strategies accordingly. Because the deadline itself was pushed back by an hour, some students were able to decide whether to apply after checking those ratios during the extended period. Students who completed their applications before 5:50 p.m. on the 11th, by contrast, could not use that information and are raising fairness concerns. In particular, if additional applicants flocked to departments with low competition ratios during the extended hour, students who had already applied to those departments could be unintentionally hurt.
The scope of relief for students who could not file because of the server error is also likely to become contentious. The council will verify records such as saved applications and proceed with remedy procedures for some students who missed the deadline. But observers say problems could arise if cases in which students never began filling out an application are treated the same as cases in which the application was completed but payment was not.
