Statistically speaking, as a reader of this blog, you are most likely a native speaker of English, so surely you must understand written English better than a random South Korean teen. Right?

Well, maybe so.

Or maybe not.

A recent article in the great podcast Subtitle told us about the most recent nationwide college entrance exam in South Korea (given two months ago). As CNN put it, it was so hard that “the exam body issued a formal apology, and one of its top executives resigned.”

Here is a multiple-choice question from the English portion of the eight-hour exam, where the test-taker had to read this passage and select the best of five choices to fill in the blank:

Kant was a strong defender of the rule of law as the ultimate guarantee, not only of security and peace, but also of freedom. He believed that human societies were moving towards more rational forms regulated by effective and binding legal frameworks because only such frameworks enabled people to live in harmony, to prosper and to co-operate. However, his belief in inevitable progress was not based on an optimistic or high-minded view of human nature. On the contrary, it comes close to Hobbes’s outlook: man’s violent and conflict-prone nature makes it necessary to establish and maintain an effective legal framework in order to secure peace. We cannot count on people’s benevolence or goodwill, but even ‘a nation of devils’ can live in harmony in a legal system that binds every citizen equally. Ideally, the law is the embodiment of those political principles that all rational beings would freely choose. If such laws forbid them to do something that they would not rationally choose to do anyway, then the law cannot be _____________________.

a. Regarded as reasonably confining human liberty.

b. Viewed as a strong defender of the justice system.

c. Understood as a restraint on their freedom.

d. Enforced effectively to suppress their evil nature.

e. Accepted within the assumption of ideal legal frameworks.

One of the Korean-American students in my Honors Precalculus course complained that the class was “unnecessarily difficult.” Her parents disagreed; they said that it was no more difficult than it needed to be, citing the standards back in Korea.

It won’t surprise you that most of my students with Korean parents showed more anxiety than their classmates — although the students with Chinese, Indian, or Greek parents begged to differ, all claiming the most anxiety. One of them even said, “My mother is Chinese and my father is Greek; can you imagine the pressure I’m under?”

Categories: Linguistics, Teaching & Learning