South Korean universities reject applicants with school bullying records.
The debate here is: Is this a good policy?
My take is that it depends on both the severity and the time of the verified bullying incidents. There is also the issue of movies and television shows focusing on bullying.
South Korean media in the past has brought about change for the better (see 도가니/Silenced. Recent movies and television shows have been highlighting the issue of bullying.
Certainly bullying falls on a spectrum from poking a little fun to violent.
The article you linked says this:
Several major private universities announced explicit penalties in their admissions guidelines. Sungkyunkwan University and Sogang University said applicants who received Level-2 disciplinary measures or higher would receive zero points, effectively disqualifying them.
Ewha Womans University restricted applications from students with bullying records in its student-record-based admissions track, while Hanyang University disqualified applicants who had received Level-8 or Level-9 disciplinary actions from all admissions tracks.
So, the universities need documented proof of the bullying and, it seems, there is a grading system involved in how severe that bullying is.
Of course, the more elite the school the more picky they can be so rejecting students based on bullying may not be a big deal if they have a long line of other highly qualified students happy to take their place.
Personally, it seems a good policy as the Koreans are doing it (near as I can tell). It is formalized, written guidelines they follow and punishes something that often has few repercussions for the bullies.
So the obvious question to me is what’s a “school bullying record”? Does that mean they’ve faced punishment at school for physically attacking someone? That totally sounds like a good reason to not accept someone into your university. The same would also be true in the US I think (though US society is so law enforcement obsessed it would probably be a criminal record not something that was handled by the school?)
Or is there some other reporting mechanism in Korea where teachers indicate if they think a kid is a bully? That seems more dubious and open to abuse.
In the article it notes that there is a formalized grading system for bullying. I agree such systems can often be dubious and open to abuse or sidestepped. But there is a system in place. How it works and if it works well I have no idea and the article does not give more detail. At least it is more than a mere accusation needed for the university to consider.
Yeah that seems very problematic, it just seems a way for the teacher to permanently damage the future of kids they don’t like with no evidence to back it up (which, while I can’t speak to how it works in Korea, would 100% mean the poor and non-white kids in the US)
All true but, FWIW, South Korea is a faaar more homogeneous society than we have in the US.
True but I bet you can still get a very strong inverse linear correlation between bullying score and family income levels
That’s just the lowest bar for taking into consideration the negative marks on anyone’s past, right? I think most of would agree if you stole Chuck’s milk money in 1st grade or dunked little Suzie Quatro’s pigtails in an inkwell in 3rd grade those incidents shouldn’t keep you out of Land Grand University. But if you’ve had frequent disciplinary problems involving bullying other children during the last few years of your primary education, it seems fair to take that into consideration. Universities don’t want their other students to be miserable because of one jerk.
Bullying is repetitive behavior designed specifically to hurt someone. It might be physical or it might be mental damage, but it’s purpose is to hurt rathe than poke a little fun. Bullies often use that as a defense, “I was just messing around,” but in my experience they usually know exactly what they’re doing. It’s certainly true, from time-to-time, someone can go a little too far while poking a little fun, but it’s typically not a problem until it becomes a pattern. If someone is consistently going too far when poking fun, they’re a bully.
I don’t really know anything about South Korea’s educational system. I’d certainly be skeptical of implementing any such system here in the United States given then are more than 13,000 independent districts whose quality varies greatly. I understand some things have improved since I was a wee lad, but my experience with bullies was neither teachers nor administrators had much of an interest in dealing with them in any meaningful way. Either you were able to take care of it yourself or you simply suffered until the boot of a schoolyard tyrant.
Just data, but it happens informally in the US, it seems.
The nephew of a coworker, according to her, was accepted to a fairly good school, then acceptance was withdrawn, and somehow became conditional on his completing anger-management classes, when the university found out he was referred to his high school’s in-house program, and never did it.
My coworker was a little “gloaty” about it, because according to her, she kept telling her sister to make him do it, and her sister said it had to be his decision, and so now he no longer can go to the one the high school conducts, and has to go to one for adults (which probably means pay for a course).
He can probably find a different university to accept him, but it will undoubtedly be less prestigious, and he wants to pursue some degree that this particular school offers.
Third hand story, but it sounds like something a university would do-- they can do pretty much what they want, as long as what they do to one, they do to all.
Unless the kid sues to make people with anger issues a protected class, he’s out of luck-- and I presume that there is some incident, or series of incidents, that led up to requiring him to attend this. If they were spurious, he may have missed his chance to challenge them and get out of the class that way.
Do you know what he did to get referred to anger management program? We’re the police involved? That’s the big difference between the US and everywhere else in my experience. I’ve had friends who had to hire a lawyer and deal with a court case over absolutely trivial crap (like stealing from lockers) their kid had done that anywhere else on the planet would be handled in the school as a disciplinary matter
I have no idea-- like I said, it’s a third hand story. If she were claiming it happened to a friend, or a more distant relative, I might dismiss it-- since she’s saying sister, and nephew, and she’s not known for fabricating or exaggerating, I’m thinking there is likely to be some underlying incident.
My point is just that it happens here-- like everything else, with various jurisdictions having different rules and different standards, it’s never organized, and you never really know what is going on.
I think that the real question is what’s the schools’ record at identifying and consistently addressing bullying? In the US, the big problem isn’t school policies: Pretty much every school has policies prohibiting bullying. You can have a problem where a teacher or administrator approves of the bullying, but while that does happen (and is horrible when it does), I’d say that that’s very rare, also. The biggest problem, though, is that we’re not always aware of bullying, and we can’t do anything about it if we don’t know about it.
I agree this is (probably) where the problem lies. @Odesio mentioned above that bullying is a pattern of behavior and not a one-off thing. As someone who was bullied a lot when growing up I get it. Teachers seemed to think it was just kids being kids and it was some kind of social learning. Find your place in society. Deal with it. Don’t ask them for help.
They seemed to think it was just a disagreement here or there that the kids should solve on their own. And kids should learn that. But when the bullying is persistent and pervasive it is a problem and, usually, the adults/teachers seem really bad at spotting it (maybe because kids are punished by peers if they run to adults for help (i.e. tattle-tale/snitch)). It’s a Catch-22 for the bullied kid.
I think that strongly depends on what is stolen from the locker, and how often it happened. If someone once stole a mars bar, that’s petty enough to be handled by the school, but if considerably amounts of money or devices like tablets or laptops are stolen, or the perp has made a habit out of breaking open lockers, involving the authorities should be appropriate.
My personal experience in the US is that whether it’s “bullying” or “horsing around” depends on how well the school administration likes you.
I’d be surprised to learn that it’s different in Korea.
Of course it’s generally the case that admission to college is correlated to how well the administration likes you.
It’s a guarantee that if you see something and ask the students, one of them will say that it’s just horsing around. Usually, the first one to answer. Now, whether they both say that, that’s another story.
Ideally, you also want to watch the same pairs of students repeatedly. If it’s “just horsing around”, it’ll go both ways.
And of course, you’ll also see plenty of “Teacher, look, she’s bullying me!” when it’s blatantly obvious that it’s nothing of the sort. I wish I could get students to stop that, too, but, well, teenagers.
Looks like generic bullying is not an absolute disqualifier for public university admission in S. Korea. Applicants lose points based on jerkishness/violence levels.
I’d imagine that students who get expelled from high school, for any reason, in any country, have a hard time getting into good colleges.
If they aren’t accepting everyone, they presumably have a standard to judge who gets in and who doesn’t. And, well, “attacked other students” is a pretty justifiable standard as such things go.
Or to flip it around, should non-bullies be excluded to make room for these bullies? Because if there’s only limited spaces, that’s the choice being made.
I don’t think this is what is happening in South Korea. It seems to me that bullying incidents are better documented through more than just one source.
These are official Ministry of Education records and in certain cases the applicants rejected by major public universities had excellent grades. I’m sure the parents would have fought this decision in court if the records had come from a less reliable source.
It is interesting to note that these records included a) physical violence, b) group bullying, c) cyberbullying, and d) coercion or extortion.