Dozens of college applicants and their parents took to the streets to criticize the Ministry of Education's handling of a system failure that disrupted early admissions applications for the 2027 academic year.
They argue that the ministry's decision to grant relief to students who could not submit applications on time because of the system error is unfair, and they are demanding that all applications filed after the original deadline be canceled.
About 50 parents and students belonging to the Students' Coalition for Fairness in Early Admissions Applications held a rally outside the National Assembly on the 19th, urging authorities to "cancel all applications submitted after the 6 p.m. deadline on the 11th."
The coalition said students who submitted applications normally before the deadline, trusting university admissions guidelines and application instructions, had followed the established rules. "But by allowing additional submissions after the deadline, a situation has arisen in which the students who followed the rules may instead be put at a relative disadvantage," the group said. Responding to the ministry's explanation that the relief measure changed university competition ratios by only 0.001%, the coalition countered that "for each individual admissions unit, even a single additional applicant can determine who passes and who fails, and for a student, even a figure of 0.001 is never trivial."
Errors appeared in the application system operated by Uway Apply for about 30 minutes starting around 5:50 p.m. on the 11th, just 10 minutes before the early admissions deadline, leaving some students unable to complete their applications and causing widespread confusion. The Korean Council for University Education and the Ministry of Education extended the application deadline by one hour, but after confirming that some students still had not been able to file, they began relief procedures.
A total of 354 students were ultimately granted relief.
The coalition also pointed out that 17 universities disclosed their competition ratios during the extended application window, leaving students who had filed by the original deadline at a relative disadvantage.
After reviewing the competition ratios at the 17 universities, the ministry identified three students who had applied to those schools and recommended that the universities cancel their applications.
The coalition argues, however, that computer records alone cannot determine whether an applicant applied after seeing the competition ratios. If a family member or friend checked the ratios and passed the information along, a student could have applied without ever viewing the data from their own account.
