Selection Mechanisms for the Korean Civil Service

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about the selection mechanisms for civil servants in various countries. I hope this will be useful given recent interest from many in trying to select for better ‘elites’. I am starting with South Korea; after this, I will write about Singapore, and then Britain. After this, I will start to try making some useful comparisons. My focus here in this comparison is upon the recruitment of what are essentially generalist administrators dealing with policy. While all countries will also recruit technical staff, often via different processes, I will not primarily be covering this issue.

In Korea, it is possible to enter the civil service at either Grade 9, Grade 7, or Grade 5. Grade 5 is in fact a fairly senior grade. I will mainly discuss the Grade 9 (the lowest grade) selection process; this is also what is most equivalent to the recruitment of graduates by the British Civil Service through the Fast Stream, though it’s certainly interesting that you can enter at a far higher grade within the Civil Service than is permitted in Britain simply through being very good at taking exams. The presence of serious exams is interesting in itself given that they previously were used in Britain, but have now been replaced by situational judgement tests and nebulous ‘competencies’.

The Grade 9 Civil Service Examination can be taken by anyone over the age of eighteen, though in practice very few test takers (much less successful ones) have not at least already completed a bachelor’s degree. There is no age limit; any adult can take the test. It is typical to study for the Grade 9 examination full time for two years, though this can be shortened somewhat dependent upon the extent of one’s previous study of English. Those who wish to take the Grade 7 and especially the Grade 5 exam will have to study for substantially longer, and it is also far from uncommon to study for longer than two years for this exam too. 

When considering that a Korean bachelor’s degree usually takes four years, the two years of extra study for the exam, mandatory military service for men of eighteen to twenty-one months (depending on branch), and potential retakes of either the Suneung (Korean college entrance exam) prior to entering college or of this exam, it is unsurprising that the average age of those who are successful reached almost 29 in 2021. 27.7% of successful test takers were in their thirties. As a result, civil servants start work much older than they typically do in Britain. Averaged over the last few years, roughly the same number of men and women are successful. 

The Korean government does not formally publish figures on which universities have graduate test takers that are most often successful, though a Korean legal journal apparently manages to collect data on successful Grade 5 test takers. They claim that in 2019 around 60% of successful applicants went to SKY (Seoul National University-Yonsei University-Korea University, the three most prestigious universities in Korea) universities. The vast majority of the remainder went to other elite universities, and only twelve universities had over three successful applicants. It seems safe to assume that the educational make up of successful applicants for the Grade 9 exam is not that different from this, albeit probably somewhat less skewed towards the elite.

Unlike in almost all job applications in Britain, the interview is a relatively unimportant part of the process; nor is there an ‘assessment centre’ with group work of any kind. In the Grade 5 process, those who reach the third round (after passing two rounds of examinations, in contrast to the single round for Grade 9 applicants) apparently outnumber the number of jobs available by only between 1.3 to 1 and 1.5 to 1. By most accounts, the proportion of Grade 9 test takers who are ultimately cut due to a poor performance in an interview is low even compared to the Grade 5 process.

If you look online, you will see it claimed that around one in thirty of applicants are successful; daunting, especially given the extraordinary level of preparation required, but not completely absurd – in Britain, this rate would not at all be considered out of the question. But this is in fact misleading, as the rate of competition and minimum exam scores required varies substantially by which position you are applying for. For example, in 2020, the lowest required score (for the Korean Correctional Service) was 347; the highest required score (for positions in the Seoul-Incheon-Gyeonggi Region’s General Administration) was 403. Here, we are obviously not that concerned with the process for selecting for roles that are not concerned with policy, nor are we that concerned with the selection process for specialist roles like statisticians, as interesting as this might be. In fact, all of the relevant rates of competition are far higher than they are in Britain.

It makes most sense to look at the rate of competition for general administrators in the central government, which in 2020 stood at around 85 to 1; and the rate of competition for general administrations in regional governments, which varied from as high as around 200 to 1 in Seoul-Incheon-Gyeonggi and Busan; to as ‘low’ as around 40 to 1 in Gangwon, Gwangju-Jeonnam and Jeju. In 2016, the rate of competition for Central Government General Administration applicants was 300 to 1. (With the exception of Seoul-Incheon-Gyeonggi, only those who have resided in the relevant region for enough time are eligible for the regional government exams.)

The exam itself consists of five sections. Three sections are mandatory regardless of the role you are applying for: Korean Language, English, and Korean History. Following this, you take two further sections dependent upon the role you are applying for, though until fairly recently, you were allowed to instead choose which further sections you wanted to take. For those applying for the general administrative roles that we are mainly concerned with, these would be Administrative Law and Administrative Science. 

The Korean Language and Korean History sections have little obvious relevance at all to work as a civil servant. The English section, while certainly testing a useful skill, is also generally not testing something that is really required to work as a civil servant in Korea. The Korean Language and above all the Korean History section have become notorious for having become increasingly (though incredibly inconsistently) difficult in the last few years for no other reason but to fail more test takers.

The Korean Language section consists of a wide range of different types of question. Rather than solely including basically g-loaded reading comprehension questions like tests such as the GRE in America (though it does also include these questions), it includes many other questions that require a substantial degree of pre-existing knowledge to answer. Hardly any of this is of any use whatsoever, and studying for this simply requires hours upon hours of tedious learning by rote. While you may very occasionally get some use out of studying Hanja (Chinese) characters, demanding exact knowledge of such useless things as the standardised way to render foreign words in Hangul or obscure grammatical rules and rules about the spacing of words seems to be an entirely pointless waste of everybody’s time.

The English section contains multiple-choice questions about vocabulary and reading comprehension. The standard it roughly requires would probably be upper B2 in the European framework. This is one of the most important barriers for those without much prior English study, though for others with far more prior knowledge this is one of the easier sections.

The Korean History section does not resemble anything that most British people would consider to be proper ‘history’. Like all of the sections in the test, it is multiple choice; it does not require any long-form answers and it is fundamentally not discursive, nor is it interested in any kind of ‘historiography’ – there can only be right and wrong answers. The questions once again require existing knowledge to answer, and will cover topics that span from ancient Korea up until modern times. The topics covered can be extremely erratic and it is this that can make studying for the test challenging. Extremely obscure or frankly bizarre questions have come up many times in the past, and in the past decade or so the exam has transformed from being the easiest section to being one of the hardest. One older regional civil service Korean History test asked “Which of the following independence activists was originally from our region?”; more recently, one test asked “How many books did [Late Joseon Neo-Confucian philosopher] Jeong Yak-yong publish?”. (The answer is apparently 500.)

The Administrative Law section is generally considered by far the most useful section, as it is directly connected to the job of the Korean civil servant. The test covers knowledge of matters such as data protection; complaints and the ombudsman; anti-corruption law; and various other legal procedures related to administration. Once again, this exam is impossible to take without substantial preparation, though unlike some of the others at least has the significant virtue of not being entirely pointless.

Finally, the Administrative Science section includes various questions which require pre-existing knowledge of the arguments of a figure like Weber, and a knowledge of lots of technical jargon. Although less obviously pointless than the Korean History and Korean Language sections, it does not seem to be considered particularly useful (unlike Administrative Law). It is worth remembering that until quite recently both of these sections were optional, and a large range of difference choices were available instead.

For all of the talk of the significance of the shocking innumeracy of most British policymakers by writers from Balogh to Cummings, in Korea there is no mathematics test. Indeed, no mathematics at all is required to become a generalist civil servant in Korea. There is not even the very basic type of ‘numerical’ test that is included in many British private sector applications. Of course, general mathematical ability would almost certainly be far higher among the average Korean civil service test taker than the average applicant to the British civil service; partly because of how much more selective it is, and partly because mathematics is compulsory to eighteen, and is also a required subject (and to a fairly high level, even for those who wish to study humanities) in the Korean college entrance exam. If Korean policymakers are superior to British, then it is not directly caused by having any more mathematical content in the selection process itself; in fact, quite the opposite.

In summary, although the selection process for the Korean civil service is brutal and getting a job there is extremely difficult, it does not for the most part actually test for anything that could genuinely be considered ‘practical’ with the exception perhaps of the Administrative Law section. While it is surely fairly g-loaded, it is also definitely not just a set of verbal reasoning tests. If it was, the massive amount of time required to study for it would not be needed. While in some ways more meritocratic than the British system – the test itself is entirely ‘fair’ – the sheer amount of time that is required for parents to support their children to study for it means that in practice making a serious application is off limits for many people. It is this demand for a massive amount of preparation for the exam that clearly distinguishes the Korean selection mechanism from essentially all selection mechanisms – both public sector and private – in Britain. Additionally, the inclusion of the English section – something which will almost always benefit the wealthy – further weakens how genuinely ‘meritocratic’ the exam is.

Nor is there much consideration of anything that would be considered to be ‘policymaking’. No proper analysis of data or similar is required either. There is no discursive element to the process, either in the form of group discussions at assessment centres (as is common in Britain) or in the form of long-form writing. While the latter is covered in the exams for higher grades, this seems to be an obvious omission (albeit one that would be expensive to deal with) for Grade 9. While you could perhaps claim that the Administrative Law and Administrative Science sections cover ‘policymaking’, this is not really the sort of policymaking that I am talking about here.

Despite all this extraordinary competition and the massive preparation required for success, salaries for civil servants are poor. This remains true even when considering that Korean salaries are usually very closely tied to length of service, and remembering that essentially all civil servants will have their pay topped up by bonuses. Even when considering their maddeningly complex system of bonuses, average salaries for first year Grade 9 civil servants still apparently remain under £15,000 – and before bonuses, only barely that of a full-time minimum wage job. This pay is also poor when compared to the salaries available for university graduates at large corporations, which on average begin at over £25,000 before bonuses are taken into account; furthermore, although getting a job at a large corporation is also extremely competitive (and also often requires further study, particularly of English), it still doesn’t come close to the absurd amount of competition and effort required for to successfully get a job in the Korean civil service. Nor are salaries particularly high for senior civil servants either - which are still far lower than that of their equivalents in Britain.

Unlike in many other countries, hours for civil servants are also often very long (though probably not as long as at big corporations) even by Korean standards. Although it is the norm for the public sector to pay less than jobs at large, established corporations in the private sector, if we compare the standard fast stream starting salary in Britain of £27,000 to the standard large corporate job’s starting salary (hard to estimate, but probably around £29,000, though jobs in finance will pay substantially more) we can see that the differential is far smaller in Britain, despite the public sector also almost always requiring far shorter hours.

This raises the question of why the Civil Service remains so attractive to so many elite Korean graduates. There seem to be two main reasons. Firstly, the Civil Service is appealing because it provides extremely stable employment. While this is also seen as a big positive in Britain, this stability is ultimately seen as far more important in Korean society than in Britain, where simply earning more money at the cost of job security is seen as a relatively better trade-off. Secondly, the Civil Service and its exams have always been extremely important in Korean society, both through its Confucian legacy and through the role of the state in Korea’s economic development. Whether this appeal continues in the coming decades is unclear, though the intensity of competition shows no sign of fading any time soon.