A marathon that lasts 13 hours for blind students
Every November, South Korea pauses for its infamous college entrance exam.
Shops are closed, flights are rescheduled to reduce noise, and even the pace of students’ morning commutes slows.
By late afternoon, most of the candidates emerge from the school gates, breathing a sigh of relief and hugging family members waiting outside. But not everyone finishes at that time. Darkness falls but some students are still in the classroom. They are the blind students, who often spend more than 12 hours practicing the longer version of Suneung. The BBC tells it.
Today, over 550,000 students across the country will take the Suneung, short for College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) in Korean. This is the highest number of candidates in the last seven years.
The test not only determines whether people will be able to attend college, but it can also affect their job prospects, income, where they live and even their future relationships.
Depending on the subject chosen, students answer approximately 200 questions in Korean, mathematics, English, social or natural sciences, an additional foreign language and Hanja (the classical Chinese characters used in Korean).
For most students, it’s an eight-hour marathon of back-to-back exams. They start the test at 8.40am and finish around 5.40pm.
However, students with severe vision problems are given a test duration longer than the standard one, which can reach up to 13 hours.
There is no break for dinner: the exam continues without interruption.
The physical bulk of Braille test sheets also contributes to their length. When every sentence, symbol and diagram is converted to Braille, each test packet becomes six to nine times larger than its standard equivalent.
According to data from the Ministry of Education and the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, 111 blind candidates took the test across the country last year, including 99 with low vision and 12 with severe vision problems.
