The Suneung Exam

At seven in the morning, a long siren runs the length of a street in Seoul.

The city hears police sirens every morning. But on this particular day, the wailing car is usually not chasing anyone. It is carrying someone. In the back seat sits a girl who is afraid she will be late, clutching a pouch of pencils and her exam admission card.

The day is called Suneung, the university entrance exam of South Korea. It falls on a Thursday in the middle of November, and it lasts exactly one day. But for that one day, a whole country willingly moves its own schedule out of the way.

Everything turns on one strict deadline: ten minutes past eight in the morning.

At that moment, the gates of the exam sites close. Anyone who arrives later cannot get in. So from first light, more than 10,000 police officers and thousands of patrol cars have spread out across the roads. Any student who sees they are about to be late only has to dial one one two. A police car comes to pick them up, or a police motorcycle if the traffic is jammed. It takes them straight to the exam room, free of charge. One year, the police got 154 students there in time. They also helped nine others find admission cards that had gone missing.

That day, the country opens 1,310 exam sites. Each room is set with 28 seats. Altogether, more than 500,000 young people sit down at once.

But the loudest place that morning is outside the gate, just before it shuts.

That place belongs to the younger students. They come early and line both sides of the entrance, cheering at the top of their lungs. They hold up hand-painted signs and press a chocolate bar or a piece of candy into the hands of the older students. Teachers stand there too. Some parents walk their child right up to the gate and stay, watching a small back disappear inside before they turn away. All day long, in Buddhist temples and churches across the country, grown-ups sit and pray for the young ones.

At eight forty, the first paper begins.

And at that moment, the city outside shows its most unusual side.

The streets are quieter than usual that morning. Government offices and many large companies are asked to push their start time back to ten, so that the cars carrying students can go first. Even the stock exchange moves with them. On an ordinary day, it opens at nine in the morning and closes at half past three in the afternoon. On exam day, it opens at ten and closes at half past four. The whole money machine of a large economy shifts by an hour, just because the children need the road.

The most memorable part comes early in the afternoon, and few places in the world do anything like it.

Five past one in the afternoon.

From that minute on, across the whole sky over South Korea, not a single plane may take off. Not a single one may land. Planes already in the air must stay above 3,000 meters, circling and waiting up high. The only exception is an aircraft in trouble that needs to come down urgently.

The order lasts 35 minutes.

Those 35 minutes are a silence set aside for the English listening test. In the exam rooms, a recording begins to play, and more than 500,000 heads tilt toward the speaker. One engine roaring across the sky at just that moment would be enough for a student to miss a sentence. So the whole sky is asked to step aside.

One year, 140 flights had to be rescheduled because of these 35 minutes. Some passengers on their way to Korea may well have sat by the window as their plane circled over a sea of clouds, waiting, with no idea why. The reason lay far below, in a classroom playing a listening recording.

Then at one forty in the afternoon, the sky is set free.

At the airports, the planes that have been waiting in line start rolling again. The sound of engines returns. The country is noisy once more, just as before.

Only the school gates stay shut. Inside, the exam is not over yet.

Not until about five forty-five in the evening does everything truly stop. By then the November sky over Seoul has gone dark, the streetlights are all on, and the wind is cold. And the crowd outside the gate gathers again.

Parents have been standing there a long time, a coat in one hand and a bottle of warm water in the other. The doors open, and the children pour out. One jumps for joy, one throws both arms around a friend, and one walks straight into a mother's arms without a word. Hardly anyone asks about the exam paper right away. One mother simply asks whether her child is hungry, then leads the way to dinner.

What is worth remembering about Suneung, in the end, is not on the exam paper.

It lies in a country that can delay the opening of its money markets, hold planes in midair and send thousands of patrol cars onto the roads. That same country lets the younger students crowd both sides of the gate, all for one day that belongs to its children. For 35 minutes, the whole country lowers its voice, so that a few hundred thousand young people can hear clearly.

That evening, as the crowd at the gate thins out, the city quietly settles back into its usual ways. Traffic runs to its normal hours. The airports fill up again.

And somewhere in that traffic, a police car is heading back. It is the same car whose siren wailed down the street at seven in the morning. Today its driver chased no one. The biggest thing he did all day was get one child there before ten past eight.