Can Students Be Punished for 'Sexual Harassment and Malicious Comments' in Teacher Evaluations?

Ministry of Education Faces Ongoing Criticism Despite 'Enhanced Filtering' Alternative
Filtering System Fails to Block Use of Consonants and Slang
Anonymous System Makes Identifying and Punishing Offending Students Difficult
"Measures Like ID Usage Needed to Protect Teachers"

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Hyun-joo] The teacher competency evaluation (teacher evaluation), introduced to enhance teachers' professionalism, has degenerated into a 'disgraceful outlet.' It was revealed that a student at a high school in Sejong City left vulgar insults and sexually harassing remarks in the descriptive section of the teacher evaluation. The education office stated that it would strengthen filtering to protect teachers, but as the same controversy repeats every year, doubts about its effectiveness are being raised. Public opinion is also growing in favor of punishing students who make human rights violations and sexually harassing remarks against teachers.

Teachers' unions and others are calling for the abolition of the teacher evaluation due to concerns about such dysfunctions, but the Ministry of Education views the evaluation as playing a significant role in providing a channel for opinions and encouraging teachers' self-reflection, and thus intends to improve the system rather than abolish it. The Ministry of Education announced that it would thoroughly review and improve the filtering system for descriptive questions to prevent such problems from recurring.

However, there are criticisms that strengthening filtering alone is insufficient. Insults against teachers through descriptive questions in teacher evaluations have been recurring issues since the introduction of the evaluation in 2010. In surveys conducted by the Teachers' Union Federation in 2019 and 2020, reports included vulgar insults such as 'makes me sick,' 'trash,' 'kkolfemi' (a derogatory term for feminists), and sexually harassing expressions like 'jjukjjukbbangbbang' (a slang term with sexual connotations). Subsequently, the Ministry of Education introduced an automatic filtering system that does not deliver responses containing profanity or insults to the evaluated teacher. However, in this case, the system failed to block attempts to bypass filtering by inserting numbers or periods between words. It was also found that the filtering system could not catch cases where only consonants or slang were used.

The Twitter account 'Teacher Evaluation Sexual Harassment Victim Publicization,' which publicized this incident, criticized the Ministry of Education on the 7th, saying, "The current system conceals the student's crime and takes no responsibility." It further demanded, "Instead of offering empty feedback like 'strengthening filtering later,' immediately consider and provide answers on how to protect the victims, how to protect and educate the students of the school where the incident occurred, and how to improve the state of education and teachers' rights in this country."

It also called for guidance and punishment for the offending student. The account requested, "Support the victims so they can recover and return to the educational field, and protect them from secondary harm. Also, implement all possible measures to identify the offender so that the offending student, who committed a serious crime under the cover of anonymity, can be guided and punished."

However, punishing the offending student is practically difficult. In the current teacher evaluation system, an anonymous evaluation method is adopted to receive honest answers, making it difficult to identify the offending student.

Attorney Noh Young-hee explained, "In cases where IDs are used like in portal site comments, if the victim wishes to pursue punishment, they can request the cyber investigation unit to track the IP and punish the offender. However, if identification is not possible, it is difficult to find and punish the culprit." According to Lee Jang-won, spokesperson for the Teachers' Union Federation, the current teacher evaluation operates on an authentication access method rather than an ID creation or assignment method.

As an improvement measure for the teacher evaluation, the use of 'IDs' has been proposed. Along with the Ministry of Education's suggestion to strengthen filtering, it is proposed to change the system to generate and assign IDs so that students can be identified if incidents like this recur. If the offending student is identified, they can be punished under the Information and Communications Network Act for defamation and other offenses.