The Korean Council for University Education (KCUE) said it will overhaul its online application system and its response procedures for technical failures ahead of the regular admissions round, following a computer outage during early admissions applications for the 2027 academic year. The council is also weighing a plan to assign applicant numbers at random to prevent applicants from estimating the size of the applicant pool, but said it will decide carefully given the risk of system conflicts.
Lee Ki-jung, chairman of the KCUE, told a parliamentary audit at the National Assembly Education Committee on the 12th that the council takes the matter very seriously as the body responsible for university admissions operations. "We will work to strengthen the stability and management of the application system so that this does not happen again," he said.
The outage hit Uway Apply, the contractor that handles university application intake, at about 5:50 p.m. on Sept. 11, just 10 minutes before the original 6 p.m. deadline. The disruption lasted until 6:20 p.m., leaving some students unable to complete their applications and payments.
The KCUE and the Ministry of Education extended the application deadline by an hour to 7 p.m. But 17 universities, including Gyeongin National University of Education, Pukyong National University, Dong-A University, Silla University and Handong Global University, published their application-to-seat ratios shortly after the original 6 p.m. cutoff, raising questions about fairness. Some students were thrown into confusion after failing to see the notice of the extension in time. Of 1,588 requests for remedy filed afterward, 414 were accepted, and 354 of those applicants ultimately completed their applications.
At the audit, lawmakers also raised the problem of applicant numbers that allow the size of the applicant pool to be inferred. Randomizing the numbers would assign them at random so that the order of submission cannot be identified. Asked by Rep. Lee Joo-young of the Reform Party whether randomization could be applied starting with the regular admissions round, Lee said some universities already use it. "We are trying to find a way to apply it to the regular round if possible, but we are quite concerned about the possibility of another system conflict," he said. "If we gain technical confidence, we will use it this time, but if not, we are considering what a second option might be."
The lawmaker said that at some universities, 46% of those who applied just before the deadline were disqualified for incomplete documents, and argued that the possibility of inflated applications needs to be investigated. Lee responded that it was the first he had heard of a 46% rate of incomplete documents. "We will look more closely at whether this happened at any particular school," he said.
The KCUE is conducting a special investigation with the Ministry of Education and the Korea Advancing Schools Foundation (KASFO), a state-funded body that supports private school management, and is running a dedicated task force for the regular admissions round. "Based on the findings, we will review and improve the system's advance checks, the manual for responding to failures, guidelines on releasing application ratios and the applicant numbering system," Lee said.