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Coronavirus pandemic
This Week in AsiaHealth & Environment

Coronavirus: think home-schooling is stressful? Spare a thought for South Koreans

  • Students facing one of the world’s most notoriously stressful exams – the eight-hour Suneung – fear the virus has compromised their chances
  • Most study halls that help them prepare have shut, adding to their worries. However, some are seeing the bright side too

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A student works on his laptop at home in Suwon, South Korea. Photo: Reuters
David D. Lee
As parents and students across the world struggle to come to terms with the horrors of home-schooling, spare a thought for those in South Korea.
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In a country that takes education so seriously that aeroplanes are sometimes diverted to avoid distracting students, the switch is proving particularly stressful.

Classes finally resumed this week after the coronavirus outbreak turned what was supposed to be a typical two-week Spring break into 38 days of school-less uncertainty. But even then students did not return to their desks as they had hoped. Instead they had to navigate a strange new world of live-streaming through the Educational Broadcasting System’s Online Class and videoconferencing over Zoom, with all the teething issues that entails.

While that will be a familiar scenario to the hundreds of millions of students across the globe who are estimated to be home-schooling during the outbreak, few are under the same pressure as their South Korean counterparts.

Usually at this time, final-year students are beginning their run-up to what is widely seen as one of the world’s toughest and most stressful school-age exams, the eight-hour Suneung or College Scholastic Ability Test. So important is the life-defining Suneung, which determines everything from whether a student will go to university to their job prospects and even their future relationships, that aeroplanes change their flight paths and businesses their opening times to keep noise to a minimum during its duration.

News that the exam will now be delayed has unsettled many students who are also fretting that the quality of teaching will fall during the period of home schooling.

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