A student arrives after being given a lift by police to sit for the annual college entrance exam outside the Ehwa Girls Foreign Language High School in Seoul on November 17, 2022. AFPPIX: South Korea closed its airspace to ensure silence and offered police escorts for tardy test takers Thursday as more than half a million students sat high-stakes college admission exams.
The enormous pressure on students in South Korea's ultra-competitive education system has been blamed for teenage depression and suicide rates that are among the highest in the world. At lunchtime, students taking the exams will be given a three-sided screen to shield them from others as part of a Covid-prevention measure, and they are banned from chatting or eating in groups.
One student got out of a police vehicle and rushed to her classroom, seemingly desperate to make it on time.