A resignation and an apology after South Korean college-exam errors

South Korea's education minister apologised and the head of the national exam board resigned yesterday after accepting that there were errors in two questions in the country's cut-throat college entrance test.

The acknowledgement that mistakes were made followed a flood of complaints to the exam board from students and parents for whom the college exam is the culmination of 10 years of gruelling, high pressure study and substantial financial sacrifice.

"I express deep regret and recognise an urgent need to improve the question-making process," Education Minister Hwang Woo-yea said in a televised statement. "We will investigate the root cause of the problem."

Nearly 650,000 students across the country sat the November 16 exam that will go a long way to defining their adult lives in an ultra-competitive society. Success means a secured place in one of South Korea's elite universities - a key to future work and even marriage prospects.

With so many taking the exam, and so many scoring highly, one small error can put a student on the wrong side of the extremely thin cut-off line for a top university. Hence the uproar over the two suspect multiple-choice questions - one in the biology exam and one in the English language paper.

In their statements yesterday, the authorities agreed the questions were faulty and announced they would accept two possible answers as correct in each case.