Adaptation in action: the rise and fall of academic publications from Korean high schoolers, 2001–2021

Abstract

South Korea implemented many-pronged educational reforms, notably to transition from heavy reliance on a high-stakes standardised test to more diversified assessment for university admissions. Nonetheless, this effort created another arena of competition towards meritocratic credentials—such as academic publications. The South Korean government, in 2014, prohibited high schools from documenting students’ extracurricular accomplishments earned outside schools. This paper analyses the impacts of these reforms. We queried large-scale bibliographic databases with prestigious high schools’ names in South Korea and retrieved publications where high school students were granted authorship between 2001 and 2021. We examine associations between school types, research topics, and the status of scholarly venues. We also show the number of papers from Korean high schoolers rose until the mid-2010s but declined after the 2014 intervention. Our findings suggest that diverse adaptive strategies can evolve as long as meritocratic ethos persists. We discuss further implications beyond the context of South Korea.

Keywords:

• South Korea
• academic publications
• adaptation
• educational reforms
• university admission
• high school students

Acknowledgements

We appreciate the helpful comments from ChangHwan Kim, Ohjae Gowen, Hong Jin Jo, and Junsol Kim on various stages of our manuscript. This work was completed in part with resources provided by the University of Chicago’s Research Computing Center.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It was administered twice only in 1993, when it was first introduced.

2 The CSAT was not the first national-level standardised exam in Korea. We refer to Kwon et al. (2017) for a comprehensive historical overview of the educational regimes based on high-stakes exams in Korea.

3 The names for this type of school can vary substantially; to name a few: international high school, global high school, international academy, and high school of international studies.

4 The English names were collected from each school’s official website, as almost every high school in Korea operates its own webpage.

5 Our source includes the predatory conference list from Kscien, the list of predatory journals and conferences from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the expressions of concern from the Journal Citation Report maintained by Clarivate Analytics, and also the list of predatory and suspicious publishers and journals from Jeffery Beall (Macháček and Srholec 2022; Sorokowski et al. 2017; Waltman and Larivière 2022).

6 As noted, a subsequent intervention instituted in 2018 further barred students from showcasing extracurricular achievements even in admission essays. However, other factors, such as political scandals surrounding children of high-profile politicians involved in this practice and the COVID-19 lockdown, are confounded with the effect of the 2018 intervention.

7 For instance, we discovered that 36 student authors’ given names are recorded only as combinations of initials and family names (e.g. S. Han), making it impossible to infer their genders with any degree of accuracy. This issue is compounded in the sense that contemporary Korean given names (e.g. ‘Juhyun,’ ‘Hyunseo’) can be used for any gender. These observations reflect the complexities and limitations inherent in using name-based methods for gender identification, particularly in cultures where given names may not strongly signify gender (Lockhart, King, and Munsch 2023).

8 The author’s information from the paper identifies her as a university-affiliated researcher, not a student affiliated with high school; thus, this case is not included in our dataset of 492 papers.