South Korea’s infamously difficult college-entrance exam can open the door to a promising future—but just 3% of students who took it recently landed a top-tier score for English, half of last year’s rate. A top official overseeing the test’s creation resigned in disgrace.
Colleges typically look only at a student’s test score when choosing whom to accept or reject. The pressure is so great that some superstitious students avoid washing their hair or trimming their nails as the single exam day every November approaches—fearful knowledge might slip away. The roughly eight-hour test covers various topics such as math, Korean history and English.
To get a top-tier result for English, a student with a perfect score on the listening section could miss no more than three of the test’s 28 reading-comprehension problems. These are the five toughest, according to EBS, South Korea’s public education broadcaster. See how you would fare.
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Giving clients sufficient opportunity to react to your designs while in progress is a key to professional success. Similarly, involving prospective building users as well as clients is even more valuable in the long run. Say your client is a large corporation, such as a health care provider. While the hospital administration may serve as your client, no doubt the perspectives of administration personnel will differ significantly from those of doctors, interns, residents, nurses, and other medical staff who use the building regularly. In addition, the experiences of patients and visitors who use the building irregularly, often as a result of life-threatening emergencies, are altogether different as well. Understanding how each type of user experiences the current medical environment as well as how each reacts to your prospective designs inevitably produces a better building. People are likely to be more satisfied with a new building or addition if they ________________________________________. For a large institution, this can translate into increased productivity on the job, reduced absenteeism, less turnover, and lower costs.