North Gyeongsang education office pushes overhaul of student assessment

The North Gyeongsang Provincial Office of Education announced Monday that it is pursuing a sweeping overhaul of student assessment aimed at developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and at ensuring that assessment results feed back into learning.

The initiative centers on four areas: strengthening teacher expertise, developing and distributing short-answer and essay-type assessment questions, building an AI-based assessment support system, and broadening buy-in from schools.

The drive has already drawn strong interest from teachers. A recent recruitment call for a short-answer and essay question development team sought around 50 participants but drew applications from more than 120 teachers — a sign of broad support among educators for this type of assessment and their desire to sharpen their evaluation skills.

The provincial education office said it will select development committee members based on subject-area expertise and classroom experience before beginning work on the questions.

Selected teachers will analyze achievement standards to define assessment elements and prompts, then develop short-answer and essay questions along with scoring rubrics, model answers and feedback materials.

The completed materials will go through joint review and pilot application in schools before being revised and distributed in the first semester of the 2027 academic year.

The office is also running training programs to build teachers' assessment expertise. After training 100 short-answer and essay assessment specialists last year, it has this year trained 200 teachers through first and second rounds of a basic course for teaching and assessment specialists.

Alongside this, the office plans to build an AI-based support system for short-answer and essay assessment, covering question and rubric management, AI-assisted scoring and feedback, and teacher review.

A forum titled "North Gyeongsang Student Assessment Transformation: Together" will be held at the North Gyeongsang Provincial Office of Education Culture Center in Pohang on Oct. 31, with 250 teachers and other participants already registered.

The forum will be held under the theme "Learning begins again from assessment," with discussions on the direction of change in student evaluation and the sharing of classroom teaching and assessment practices.

"The strong interest teachers have shown in the question development team, the training programs and the forum reflects the expectations schools have for change in student assessment," North Gyeongsang Superintendent of Education Im Jong-sik said. "We will strengthen field-centered support so that teachers can lead that change with confidence and expertise in assessment."