The entrance examination system of the Korean music colleges is to be structured to assess the students' musical talents and their potentials for the professional musicians. However, there have been many problems about the current college entrance ass...
The entrance examination system of the Korean music colleges is to be structured to assess the students' musical talents and their potentials for the professional musicians. However, there have been many problems about the current college entrance assessment system for piano-major-in students and it is not properly done to evaluate them. More seriously, it has a big influence on the whole Korean piano education. In this respect, my study aims for the ways to improve the music college entrance examination mainly by examining and analyzing the audition pieces that have been chosen from 1997 to 2008.
First, I overlooked the general purpose of piano education for the theoretical base of this study, and researched the entrance examinations of six universities in U.S.A. and Europe as a role model.
In order to scrutinize the Korean Music College Entrance Examination, I studied the audition pieces that have been selected from the six universities in Seoul. Then, I compared the examination system of the six Korean universities with those of the six model foreign universities in an analytical point of view.
I did a questionnaire for 271 students majoring in piano from the seven music colleges in Seoul in order to analyze the problems of the current piano education and its examination. The questions are selected and arranged to find out their opinions about the current entrance examination and also to find out how the audition pieces affected their previous piano learning while preparing the entrance test.
The survey results indicates that the majority of students received a test-based piano education, which focused on technical skills of piano performance and teacher-centered lectures only for the test success, not for their aptitude development.
The college entrance examination for the piano majors in Korea has greatly changed so far, but there are still many aspects to be improved in terms of a short assessment time, an inadequate method of testing musical talents, a limited range of audition pieces selection, and the lack of diversity in repertory.
Here are several solutions I suggest for the music college (piano majors) entrance examination. First, the duration of an entrance audition should be extended enough to evaluate each tester in all its aspects. Second, students should have a chance to learn piano songs of the different age by suggesting a variety of audition pieces for each musical period. Third, a test should be integrated to evaluate a full range of students' musical potential talents. Fourth, examiners should be carefully selected and choose the right students according to the particular preferences of each university.
The study is a general inquiry into the Korean music college entrance examination, its problems and the possible solutions. I hope that this study can help to make theoretical and practical grounds for a new practical test system well-suited to the fundamental purposes of piano education and for a music college to select the students who has a great musical potentials and talents.