College entrance examinations emphasize the importance of student records as key admission material with the expansion of both recommendation exams and admission office exams in Japan. While it is common for institutions to only focus on the grade point average of applicants, they do not typically evaluate students’ performance in other activities during high school. Dealing with the issue of student records, this paper will focus on two Korean universities as case studies, and discuss how they evaluate such records. Korean universities have various admission routes, one of them being student record admission, which is becoming more popular with Korean universities. The Korean government has issued guidelines regarding how to use these records but does not provide much detail on matters at an institutional level. Their research results, or practices, will be considered to be useful references for Japanese universities. A key finding in this study is two clear patterns in the use of student records in the admission process. One university places a greater emphasis on academic abilities rather than on non-academic areas such as ‘passion to specific academic fields’, ‘character’, ‘leadership’, and ‘creativity’. In contrast, the other university emphasizes non-academic areas over academic ones. A further finding is that both universities eventually give a score for both academic and non-academic areas using a 1-point scale, even if they first just look at grades. While the universities set apparent criteria for marking to avoid prejudice by examiners, the process is essentially the same as the traditional scoring systems. This clearly suggests continuing importance of the 1-point scale in the examinations.

本研究はJSPS科研費JP15H05197の助成を受けたものです。