The Ministry of Education said it will review the college application systems run by private vendors including Uway and Jinhaksa, following a service outage on the 11th during early admissions for the 2027 academic year.
"Because these application systems are set up through contracts between universities and the vendors, there appear to be blind spots," a ministry official said at a briefing on the 14th. "We will look broadly at what caused the technical failure and how the system outage was handled." The official added that the ministry would "examine all the universities as well as the vendors and then prepare corresponding measures," and stressed that while "we do not have the legal authority to investigate private companies, given the gravity of the matter we will mobilize every available step and carry out the investigation without fail."
For the three-day relief process for affected applicants that began the same day, the ministry set the application records remaining as of 5:50 p.m. on the 11th as the standard for eligibility. The ministry had earlier pushed back the deadline for early admissions applications by an hour, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on the 11th, and estimates that about 1,200 students were unable to complete their applications during that window. "We plan to provide relief based on the drafting records that were in progress at 5:50 p.m., when the outage occurred," the official said. "We will not accept requests from those with no application record, or requests that differ from the records at that time."
Citing fairness toward applicants who had completed their submissions earlier, the ministry says additional applications will be allowed only where a student's digital records match the university, admissions track and program they had been applying to at the time of the outage. Applicants who left no application record are therefore excluded from relief.
The ministry will also grant relief to students who, unable to apply to their intended university through Uway Apply, submitted applications to other universities through Jinhak Apply. Even in those cases, however, relief applies only if records remain of an attempt to fill out an application or make a payment for the originally intended university at the time of the outage.
The ministry and the Korean Council for University Education are examining cases in which students filed new applications to universities whose competition ratios had already been disclosed during the deadline extension. Under review are cases in which there was no record of an application being written or saved for that program before the outage, but a new application was filed during the extended window after the odds were made public. The ministry plans to determine whether the cases were unfair after checking the relevant records, and says penalties such as canceling applications will be decided after further discussion.
