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Comment by isostatic | Hacker News Reader

"That's why we spend 12 years preparing for this one day. I know people who've taken this exam up to five times."

OK, so it's not really "one day" then.

I don't understand why.

"Instead of pitying us, I wish foreigners would think how awesome we are."

Passing exams is a pointless activity. I'm more interested in results. Those results can be measured in many ways - in power, in lives saved in surgery, in money, in kindness, in criminals caught, in lines of code, in numbers of citations in academic papers, in how many followers you have on Instagram. Korea is a fairly successful country, but it's not leaps and bounds above other countries that don't have this level of stress. It's not something I want my country to aspire to.

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> I don't understand why.

It's because you don't live in a highly competitive society. People try everything they can to squeeze extra points out of these exams. It's the only way to get into good universities. Why do you have to go to good universities? When thousands of people applying for one job, the company will try to find the fastest way to filter out applicants, and your degree is the easiest way for you to stand out. In an ultra competitive society, you do everything you could to stand out, otherwise you won't stand a chance.

And the results are somewhat good with formerly Japan and now South Korea being one of the leaders in innovation. Albeit much less competitive China, USA, France and Germany are still close enough.

The problem with Japanese and Korean style of achievement is that it can get you to rest on your laurels and additionally it is anti-creative, strongly promoting patterns, knowledge and effort over novel approaches.

All in all, few types, perhaps even none, of standardized tests allow novel solutions.

> Albeit much less competitive China

I'm not sure about this. From what I've read, Chinese society is more competitive, not less.

Competing to finish in the top 3% of an arbitrary test isn’t really useful. Setting up your youth to have 97% be failures isn’t really useful.

That "five times" means spending extra four years, one exam per year, without doing anything else but preparing for the exam to enter a college. So most people really hope to finish it in "one day".

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