As everyone is ware of tim in the past four months KAIST four undergraduate and one professor committed suicide, courting controversies over KAIST's GPA oriented system and their scholarship program. When KAIST was initially founded, it was prominent for providing its scholarship to all undergraduate students. But since 2007, the policy has changed like this- students with GPA lower than 3.0 were required to pay some amount of tuition fees and those who had received GPA lower than 2.0 had to pay full tuition fees. This policy was adopted to create mure competitive academic atmosphere by President Nam at KAIST. However, this system proved to contain serious problems, making students unhappy. Some have claimed that current scholarship program might lead to a series of suicides. Even media has pointed out that this chaos was largely due to an ineffective education ac KAIST. 
    My view is that its new policy's disadvantages far outweigh its advantages, I admit the fact that the GPA oriented tuition fees system strongly motivated students to compete with one another ferociously, while some students fail to be as intelligent as other can be. As a consequence, unsuccessful students are forced to face some sort of punishment. For those who are financially suffering, this system can be a real burden not only to students but to his or her whole family. Does the GPA oriented tuition fees is the only solution that they have? There can be alternatives. For instance, school can offer extra study programs for the student with low GPA by providing such opportunities for doing better jobs in their following examinations. Also, we can consider the option of providing counseling courses to unsuccessful students. Whether it is their fault or not, there exist many disturbing factors that distract students to the point of giving up their studies. It will be beneficial to students in the sense that such measures may serve to prevent them from committing suicide. 
 
    I must say I am not targeting KAIST. KAIST's problem seems to be typical of Koreans educational system. Through hard work, we became university students. Universities should put more emphasis on pursuing extracurricular activities. Don't we all know that getting a good grade sometimes is not directly related one's success? I'm not saying that we need to neglect our studies. The point that I would like to make is that under competitive and GPA oriented system education may not be successful and even harmful. It's time for universities to provide more opportunities to learn about responsibility and leadership. We need to live together, breathing the spirit of cooperation and encouragement. 

 

By   Yoon Sang-hoon, Senior
Dept. of Communication

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