Divs-poole

JAPANESE TERTIARY EDUCATION 

Japanese teenagers, then, apply to take an entrance examination for admission into 

a university or junior college. The entrance system into these universities and 

colleges in Japan has been described as a hierarchical system of “examination hell” 

(juken jigoku) by more than one critic (Cutts 1997; Yoneyama 1999). Families 

invest enormous resources, both in time and money, for students to cram for the 

tests. In nearly one-third of these cases, students even devote a year or two after 

high school to further prepare to sit the examination yet again, often receiving 

intense instruction at preparatory schools designed to help them cram for these 

tests.  

However, to what extent this “hell” affects the entire university-bound student 

population is open to considerable debate. Hood points out that the predominant 

assumption that almost all Japanese students have to endure an examination hell is 

both “over-hyped” (Hood 2001a, p. 7) and “was probably never correct and 

certainly does not apply now” (Hood 2001b, p. 166). The obvious reason is that as 

in Euro-American HE systems, the pressure on students taking entrance 

examinations is directly proportional to the prestige of the institution to which they 

are applying (Lee-Cunin 2004, 2005). After helping to prepare and administer 

entrance exams and interview questions for the selection of three cohorts of 

incoming freshman at EUC, I must admit that my data is supportive of Hood’s 

analysis. The majority of entrance exam takers are not worried about getting in to a 

university as much as which university. EUC entrants are not shooting for the top 

universities, so the students I have spoken with assure me that they felt no exam 

hell type of pressure. This EUC-type group is statistically the largest group of 

exam takers. 

Nonetheless, in a competitive atmosphere, these tests for entrance into 

universities are given great importance by students, parents, institutions, and the 

general public. Considering the authority these university examinations hold in 

Japanese society, as well as the “washback” effect they have in influencing rote 

memorization pedagogical strategies in secondary schools, in my experience a 

commensurate assessment of the quality of the tests themselves is usually lacking 

(Poole 2003a). Each university in Japan develops and administers an in-house 

entrance examination, and the entrance test developers themselves, as well as the 

institutions where they are employed, are especially hesitant to offer public data 

that would objectively evaluate these numerous admissions examinations. My 

involvement in test development has been with the foreign language portion of the 

exams—admissions examinations include a compulsory English proficiency 

subtest, although English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is not officially a state-

required subject at primary, secondary, or tertiary schools in Japan. Partly because 

of this university entrance examination focus on English, while there is only a 

small, albeit growing (Aspinall 2005), number of students exposed to language 

classes in primary school, over 10 million 12- to 18-year-olds, and another million 

or so university students, have no choice but to study English.  

Since universities in Japan do not normally have an American-style admissions 

office, the Admissions Committee, a group of appointed faculty, is responsible for 

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CHAPTER 1 

the PR and recruiting process. At EUC all fifty-nine full-time faculty members are 

expected to support this committee and must be present to administer the 

examinations during the exam season in January and February. The English portion 

of these examinations (of which I have firsthand knowledge) is developed from 

scratch in-house every year by the entire staff of six foreign-language professors. 

The content of the language examination is for the most part determined 

practically. Individual professors are very conscious of completing the onerous task 

of test writing as swiftly and painlessly as possible. For this reason, previous 

examinations are used as models, and only slight modifications are made year to 

year. It is no surprise that, since there is no resident testing “expert”  and nothing 

but very rudimentary knowledge of language assessment, the full-time professors 

among the staff at EUC hold very little discussion regarding either communicative 

language testing methodology

 

or exam quality. There is, however, much discussion 

and concern for “saving face,” i.e., avoiding mistakes in clarity, grammar, spelling, 

and typing mistakes. There is also tremendous care taken with maintaining the 

security of the tests; the drafts are kept under lock and key as they go through the 

various proofreading processes over the course of three months, from October to 

December (cf. Aspinall 2005; Poole 2003a).  

The perception of an exam hell is closely tied to the ideal of an “educationally 

credentialized society” (gakureki shakai), or a society that places utmost 

importance on a person’s educational background, particularly where they studied 

rather than what they studied, a “diploma disease” of sorts (Dore 1976). In many 

cases, the extraordinary emphasis on ranking colleges and universities has led to a 

brand-name sensitivity that may affect a person for his/her entire life. Observers 

argue, and the public knows, that one effect of a credentialized society is the 

phenomenon of exam hell. The pressure to pass high-stake exams is felt by many 

young adults in Japan (as well as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and other 

OECD countries), and some critics argue this pressure is great even when applying 

to second- or third-rate “low-status” schools such as EUC (McVeigh 2001, p. 31). 

Most teenagers are expected to prove their exam-taking talent on these fact-

oriented examinations, even though they are rarely pushed to excel academically 

once they have matriculated at a college or university (McVeigh 1997). Another of 

the negative aspects of credentialization, as discussed in the literature, is that 

entrance into a university is often equated with passing the test. This is partly true 

since, though admissions procedures are becoming more creative, the majority of 

universities have resisted any change in a system that has been in place, so it is 

argued, since the late 1800s (Amano 1990). One school of thought sees the 

university entrance and overall education system itself as inherently immobile 

(Frost 1991; Schoppa 1991), a societal “filtering” mechanism to create a class 

structure where otherwise none purportedly exists (McVeigh 2002b). 

In this university entrance system, students are strictly ranked according to a 

mock examination system administered by prep schools in which individuals are 

assigned a score (hensachi) that is norm-referenced and indexed nationally (Brown 

1995). Using this score, high school and prep school teachers advise their students 

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