The high-pressured, competitive and examination-oriented education
environment is prevalent in many parts of East Asia and has led to the
proliferation of ‘cram schools’ – known as juku in Japan, hagwons in South
Korea, and buxiban in Taiwan (see Zeng 1999; Dawson 2010; Seth 2002;
Roesgaard 2006; Liu 2012). It is reported that the number of private cram
schools in Taiwan expanded by 58 per cent nationwide between 2006 and 2012 (Anon 2012a, 2012b). Enormous investment has been made to foster a
culture of competition widely reported in the media, including the grounding
of aircrafts, offices opening late, police standing by to deal with emergencies
where students take their university entrance exams (Anon. 2011a), police
setting up road blocks around schools and nearby construction sites being
ordered to maintain silence during the ‘examination fever’ period (Sudworth
2012). Some negative consequences include student suicides before and
after their university entrance exams, the use of extreme study methods such
as hooking students up to intravenous drips as a study aid to support long
hours of study without sleep (Anon. 2012a), and teachers being attacked by
their students under examination stress (Anon. 2011b). A report on examination
systems in the Asia Pacific found that the highly competitive culture
encourages cheating and corruption, exerts increased pressure on students
to succeed, and standardized examination results have a snowball effect in
students’ progress in future stages of schooling. It recommends examination
systems to improve their strategies by assuring the integrity of assessments,
reducing examination pressures, catering for an expanding and more diverse
student candidature, assessing a wider range of curricular objectives, and
assuring quality and gaining public confidence (Hill 2010).