In South Korea's brutal education system of cram schools, endless testing and elite universities, there's one professor who hands out scholarships to the dumbest kids in class. To receive Yim Kyo Hwan's ``Scholarship for the Bottom of the Class,'' students must submit report cards that would shock most parents - those riddled with F's.Only junior-high and high-school students who rank among the lowest 5 per cent in their class need apply; the winner is the student with the worst marks. Even so, the standards are tough: No student has ever applied with failing grades in every subject.The scholarship is Yim's comment on the country's insistence on judging students on academic grades alone, funneling the ones with the highest marks to the best schools, and marginalising most of the rest. Yim, who teaches pharmacology at Chungbuk National University, started the program two years ago because he was once considered academically challenged himself. At one point in junior high school, Yim ranked 70th in his class of 72, and in college he was forced to stay in school for an extra year as he scrambled to repeat classes to graduate.``I know what it's like to be perceived as dumb in school,'' he says.Chung Sae Jin, a 17-year-old student who ranked last in his freshman high-school class of 37, is one of Yim's handpicked underachievers. Chung says he thought his teacher was pulling his leg when he told him about the scholarship. Winning the scholarship ``made me feel like I was being recognised,'' says Chung.Chung admits that not all of the 500,000 won ($422) scholarship, which comes out of Yim's own pocket, he receives each semester is spent on academics. At first, Chung dreamed of becoming a dancer, and he used some of the money to buy cassette tapes of his favorite pop stars so he could practice. But that goal lasted only a semester. He now wants to be a businessman. Since he made that decision, he says, his grades have improved.Yim doesn't care much about whether grades improve or how students use the scholarship, which he continues paying through a student's last year of high school. He is more concerned about righting wrongs of South Korea's education system. He hopes his programme gives at least a fighting chance to some of the kids who don't make it to the best schools. ``It's wrong to gauge one's potential entirely by academic grades,'' he says.- The Wall Street Journal
