The National Education Commission's debate over introducing essay and short-answer questions to the national college entrance exam has hit a snag, pushing the release of a draft national education development plan to the end of the year. At a parliamentary audit of the National Assembly's education committee on the 7th, Chairman Cha Jung-in said the commission would first expand essay-based assessment in school grades, giving public education time to prepare before overhauling the entrance exam.
Expanding essay-based assessment in school grades is the right direction. But the preparation period for school grades and the timing of the entrance exam's conversion must be presented together. If the entrance exam remains multiple-choice while only school grades shift to essays, school assessment and the entrance exam will demand different competencies. Students will bear a double burden, and classes will revert to drilling exam questions. Only by aligning the assessment paradigms of school grades and the entrance exam can the burden of private tutoring be reduced. For the cohorts subject to expanded essay-based school assessment, the timing of the entrance exam's conversion must be confirmed and announced at the same time.
The problem is that essay-based assessment in school grades is not something that has been absent until now. Despite education authorities encouraging its expansion, the decisive reason it has failed to take root in schools is the absence of marking criteria clear enough for anyone to accept, and of a framework for adjusting variation among markers. Teachers worried about disputes over fairness and complaints had no choice but to place the weight of differentiation on multiple-choice regular exams, where correct answers are unambiguous.
For essay-based assessment in school grades to work properly, Korea needs a system of internal assessment subject to external moderation, as in the International Baccalaureate. School grades and internal assessment are different things. With school grades, the result of a teacher's assessment becomes the final score. With internal assessment, external assessors sample and review what teachers have marked, and make fine adjustments when a teacher's marking falls well below or above the common standard. Because teachers remain the agents of assessment while having their judgments verified outside the school, the results earn trust comparable to externally graded scores.
Internal assessment must go beyond checking mastery of knowledge to assess thinking capacity. In history, for instance, instead of asking about individual facts, a question might ask students to discuss the view that war accelerates social change. In mathematics, students might connect equations and functions to their own interests and write an exploration report. Assessing competencies this way means the marking criteria run through the entire subject, so there is no need to create new criteria for each topic. In IB mathematics, exploration reports are marked against a single unified set of criteria — communication, mathematical presentation, personal engagement, reflection and use of mathematics — regardless of the pace of instruction or the topic. Once consistent criteria are established, a central verification body can sample and review teachers' marking and make across-the-board adjustments when variation emerges.
At the heart of this structure are a safety net for marking and stronger assessment capacity among teachers. Those unaccustomed to quantifying qualitative competencies find it hard to feel confident in their own marking. External moderation is a safety net that eases that anxiety. Complaints about the fairness of marking are absorbed by the system rather than by individual teachers, so teachers' authority to assess is protected in practice. Teachers can also use the results of moderation to calibrate their own marking standards and apply that calibration across the rest of their grading, raising the quality of assessment.
The decline of teachers' authority and the deterioration of conditions in schools today are not caused by abusive complaints alone. At the root lies the absence of teachers' authority to assess. Teachers function less as agents of the curriculum than as deliverers of a set syllabus and managers of answer keys, so assessment has come to rely on mechanical marking and classes have become training grounds for picking correct answers. The national certification system for assessment-specialist teachers, which the Ministry of Education has signaled for introduction in 2029, should not stop at simple consulting but be designed as the pool of markers for this moderation framework.
This is an era in which AI finds correct answers and writes reports in an instant. Tying teachers and students to tests that reproduce knowledge amounts to giving up on cultivating talent as a nation. Reform cannot work if the share of essay questions is increased while the burden of complaints and verification is pushed onto teachers. Trust in assessment does not come from stripping teachers of the authority to assess and having students match multiple-choice answer keys. Building a marking verification system that institutionally underpins teachers' assessment expertise — that is the path to anchoring essay-based assessment in school grades and moving toward essay-based reform of the national entrance exam.