NEW YORK – Increasing numbers of Korean students who successfully enter prestigious universities in the United States are dropping out or turning to private institutes for help in meeting the rigorous academic standards. The difficulties Korean students face can be mainly attributed to poor English skills and educational differences between Korea and the U.S., experts say.
In Flushing, New York – one of the major Korea towns in the Eastern United States – more than 300 hagwon have sprung up, largely due to the Korean zeal for education. Bell Boulevard stretches 3.5 kilometers (2.1 miles) through the district, crowded with 60 private schools targeting Korean students. The area looks just like a street in Daechi-dong, a popular hagwon district in southern Seoul.
– Hagwon in U.S. cash in on Korean undergrads (JoongAng Daily)
As I have already posted on the previous post, Korean students tend to rely hugely on helps from hagwons. Hagwon is a big and successful industry in Korea as most of the Korean parents send their children to hagwons for academic enhancements. These hagwons help hugely on raising students’ grades on GPA and SAT’s; yet there is a huge consequence that follows along. As students become more accustomed to hagwons, they lose their self-study skills and become much more dependent on hagwons. This is one of the biggest reasons to why Korean students tend to drop out most from the Ivy League schools. Not only do their English skills lack, but they lack experience of studying by themselves without hagwons. In order to help these students, hagwon industry was developed even in the United States. As the article presents, the hagwon industry is very popular even in the states, prevailing the Korean students’ huge dependence on hagwons. It is extremely surprising how within a decade numbers of hagwons in the United States increased dramatically. The popular boom of going to schools in America made more and more students to apply for American colleges.
Building full of hagwons in Dae-Chi Dong
LOS ANGELES (AFP) — American teenagers lie, steal and cheat more at “alarming rates,” a study of nearly 30,000 high school students concluded Monday.
The attitudes and conduct of some 29,760 high school students across the United States “doesn’t bode well for the future when these youngsters become the next generation’s politicians and parents, cops and corporate executives, and journalists and generals,” the non-profit Josephson Institute said.
In its 2008 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth, the Los Angeles-based organization said the teenagers’ responses to questions about lying, stealing and cheating “reveals entrenched habits of dishonesty for the workforce of the future.”
Boys were found to lie and steal more than girls.
– American teens lie, steal, cheat at ‘alarming’ rates: study (Google News)
Students cheating during their test
The above article is very interesting. As the article presents, the number of students convicting cheating and other sorts of behaviors breaking academic integrity is increasing in a dramatic rate. The primary explanation for such increase would be the increase of pressure to strive academically for future careers. Today’s society values education, especially which college the person is from, very much. It is extremely difficult to get a high price job with low ranked college graduate certificate. Korean society strongly rejects people from bad colleges and it is very difficult to get a job with such resume. As society functions in this way, students are more pressured to get higher grades to raise GPA, which counts hugely for college application. I have seen numerous incidents of cheating personally within the school; even I have been having thoughts of cheating. This was all because of pressures to get high grades. As competition for colleges increase more dramatically, such pressure becomes bigger by the day. The part about boys cheating more than girls, I think, is very true. I personally have seen much more boys cheating, lieing, and stealing than girls. Even if we look at TV’s and movie films, it is mostly boys who do such immoral behaviors. Girls are expected to be much more calm than boys. I believe the pressure to get good grades is the biggest reason to why students tend to cheat more.
As I was reading The Woman Warrior, by Maxime Hong Kingston, I found Kingston’s writing style very confusing and weird. First of all, the book, as it was described, is a book that summarizes Kingston’s childhood life as a Chinese American. This fact would obviously make it an autobiography as she is writing about her story; The Woman Warrior is also classified as autobiography in certain places. Yet if anyone reads the book by first two chapters, he/she would easily recognize that the story isn’t like all other autobiography. In fact, it is exaggerated so that it no longer seems like fact. Thing that is making the novel more like a fiction is that Kingston is telling the stories as if she was the one who was taking the actions, in a very specific manner. Even in chapter 4, Kingston describes the scene where Brave Orchid, Moon Orchid, and Kingston’s brother had a conversation in the car. It is very clear that she wasn’t there when they were talking in the car; yet when we read the scene it is written very specifically as if Kingston was really there. Kingston making up scenarios for how her no nam aunt got pregnant proves the fact that the story is exaggerated and opinionated, whereas autobiography must contain only the truth. Kingston’s writing style is also very unique as she talks in the novel as if she was the people who she describes through the story. Moreover, when the book was descrbied as the story that will describe Kingston’s life, it is more like Kingston describing her family through exaggerated stories. Read more about her writing style at 
