More than 250 applicants are expected to receive relief after a system failure disrupted early-admission applications for South Korea's 2027 college entrance cycle. The Ministry of Education has also formed a special investigation team to examine the cause of the outage, the operator's response and the management of the application system as a whole.
Education Minister Choi Kyo-jin told a plenary session of the National Assembly's Education Committee on the 16th that "based on what we have identified so far, we believe the figure will be at least around 250."
The ministry had earlier estimated that as many as about 1,200 applicants might be eligible for relief, based on records showing who was filling out applications when the system went down. Requests for relief filed as of 10 a.m. that day also totaled about 1,200. The ministry is reviewing electronic records of log-ins, application entries, saves and payment attempts to decide each case individually. The filing window closed at 6 p.m. the same day, after which the final number of eligible applicants will be confirmed.
Relief will center on applicants who could have submitted their forms before the original deadline had the system not failed. Those who gave up on applying because of the outage or who completed their applications during the extended window are the main candidates, while those who applied only after checking the revised competition ratios are excluded. As for applicants who had already submitted their forms, Choi said there appears to be "effectively no disadvantage."
The ministry has also begun a special investigation into the cause of the failure and how it was handled. The team, which includes outside experts and accounting staff, will review the system operations of Uway, an admissions services provider, and its response before and after the outage. The Korean Council for University Education also plans to examine the response framework and the application system overall to draw up institutional and structural improvements.
Gaps in the existing response manual also came under scrutiny. The ministry had a manual in place for application system failures, but the incident exposed shortcomings in the framework. "I knew a manual existed, and I believe this case has revealed that it was inadequate," Choi said. Two similar computer failures were found to have occurred during past application periods.
"We will look into this as closely as possible and provide relief so that no one is treated unfairly," Choi said, pledging to draw up measures to prevent a recurrence through a thorough investigation.
