A university campus in western Seoul is nearly empty on Sept. 11, 2020, as students took online classes. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Feb. 10 (Korea Bizwire) — Universities are cutting down on scholarships based on outstanding academic performance following the COVID-19 pandemic.
As online lectures make it more difficult for professors to assess their students’ work, several universities are opting for an absolute assessment system for marking.
The absolute assessment system turned out to be more lenient in terms of assigning good grades, resulting in a higher number of students with the same scores, making it difficult for universities to select and endow scholarships based on academic performance.
Chung-Ang University, for one, will offer no more than a 30 percent tuition waiver to students with the highest grade in each department or major.
The best academic achiever from each school year and those in the top 10 percent will receive 17 percent and 15 percent tuition waivers.
The Ministry of Education reported that 87.5 percent of all college students received school grades higher than a ‘B’ in 2020, up by 15.8 percent from the pre-pandemic era in 2019 (71.7 percent).
“There seems to be a stereotype where those who aren’t scholarship recipients are either rich or financially well-off. I wish people would realize that that’s not true for many students,” said a student surnamed Choi who is currently enrolled at Kyung Hee University.
Ashley Song (ashley@koreabizwire.com)
