The education ministry plans to introduce an “early graduation system” that will shave off six to 12 months from the three years it now takes senior high school students to graduate.
Students who have achieved certain levels of academic performance will be qualified for the system on the premise that they go on to universities.
By making it possible for students to enter universities earlier, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology hopes to develop a pool of talented people who can play active roles in Japan and the world.
To implement the system, the ministry plans to revise the School Education Law that stipulates that three years of learning are required to graduate senior high schools.
If the system is introduced, students can go on to universities after graduating from senior high schools in two years. They can also advance to overseas universities, whose admission season is mainly in autumn, after graduating from senior high schools in two and a half years.
Currently, domestic universities, including the University of Tokyo, are considering changing the admission season from spring to autumn. With high school graduations in Japan typically in March, one drawback to starting the university admission season in autumn would be the half-year gap between high school graduation and the start of college semesters in fall.
However, the problem of the half-year gap would be solved if the early graduation system is introduced.
In Japan, an early admission system to universities was approved in the revisions to the School Education Law in 1997. The early admission system enables students to skip their third year of senior high school and jump straight to college or university.
In fiscal 1998, Chiba University introduced the early admission system for the first time. Currently, six universities have accepted students under the system, although it has drawbacks.
According to the education ministry, only 101 students have gone on to universities with the system by this fiscal year.
Under the current Japanese education system, students who advanced to universities with the early admission system are recorded as those who "dropped out of senior high schools." Therefore, if they drop out of universities, their final academic records become "graduates of junior high schools."
That is said to be the main reason the number of students who use the early admission system does not increase drastically.
The ministry expects that if the students were recorded as "graduates of senior high schools," even if they spent only two years in senior high schools, the number of students who would try to use the early admission system or the number of universities that would accept those students would increase.
The education ministry plans to iron out the details of the early graduation system by the end of fiscal 2013 after holding meetings of experts or those attached to the Central Council for Education.
Meanwhile, officials of senior high schools fear that the early graduation system will lead to trivializing senior high school education. Therefore, the ministry plans to require that only students with stellar academic performances be eligible for the early graduation system.
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