On a Thursday in mid-November each year, South Korea grounds all commercial aircraft during the English listening section of its national college entrance exam, the Suneung — the stock market opens an hour late, military drills stop for the day, and police give free rides to students running behind

Once a year, on a Thursday in November, South Korea reorganises its national infrastructure around a single exam. The test is the Suneung, officially the College Scholastic Ability Test, administered by the Korea Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation.

For roughly 35 minutes in the early afternoon, the entire country goes quiet in the sky. In 2025, the government suspended all aircraft take-offs and landings nationwide between 1:05 p.m. and 1:40 p.m., the window covering the exam’s English listening section.

The scale of the pause surprises people outside Korea. The stock market opens an hour late. Military drills stop. Police stand by to ferry latecomers to their test centres.

Why would a government treat the silence of a single afternoon as a matter of national logistics?

Why the planes stop

The answer starts with the English listening section. Candidates sit an audio test, and the state’s concern is noise. A low-flying jet overhead could, in theory, disrupt tens of thousands of test-takers at once. So the transport ministry closes the airspace to departures and arrivals for the duration.

Aircraft already in the air are not simply waved through. According to the Korea Times, planes must hold at altitude while the listening section runs: “All aircraft in flight, excluding those in emergency situations, must remain in the air at an altitude of 3 kilometers or higher under the direction of air traffic control authorities.” 

The knock-on effect is real. Around the 2025 exam, 140 flights had their schedules adjusted, including 65 international arrivals and departures. For a little over half an hour, one of the busiest aviation corridors in Asia rearranges itself so that a room full of teenagers can hear a recording clearly.

The rest of the shutdown

The airspace closure is the most striking piece, but it sits inside a much wider effort. On exam morning, financial markets and many offices open an hour later than usual to clear the roads for candidates heading to their test sites. Construction pauses. Military training exercises are put on hold.

Police provide free rides to students running behind, and the country keeps over 3,000 police cars and 200 fire trucks on standby to move late or stranded candidates to their test centres. A whole society, briefly rearranged around one cohort of students on one afternoon.

What is actually at stake

To understand the shutdown, you have to understand the weight the exam carries. The Suneung is a marathon: exam day runs eight to nine hours, making it one of the longest standardised tests in the world. Its score is widely treated as decisive for university admission, and by extension for career and social standing. Places at the top-tier SKY universities, Seoul National, Korea and Yonsei, go to only around 2 per cent of test-takers.

That pressure is not lost on people who have lived inside it. Daniel Tudor, a former Economist correspondent in South Korea, put the mood plainly in a 2015 interview with NPR: “There is this sense that, ‘Oh, you’re going to fail at life unless you do well in this exam,'” he said. He described the test as an emblem of a broader culture, telling the same programme that to live in modern South Korea “is to live with constant pressure. The Suneung exam, it’s an emblem.” His remarks are one commentator’s reading, and they are now a decade old, but it seems the intensity has not eased.

If anything it has grown. In 2025, 554,174 people registered for the exam, up 6 per cent on the year before and the highest turnout since 2019. That same year, the English section proved so hard that only about 3 per cent of takers earned a top score, the lowest share since a new grading system was introduced in 2018. 

The stakes are visible in the crowds that gather outside the test centres. Yeseon Kim, waiting for her daughter at one site, told CNN: “This exam has been a goal for nearly 20 years and also a new beginning.” One parent’s reaction, not a survey of the country, but it captures why the government treats the day the way it does.

Most countries hold high-stakes exams. Few treat the quiet needed to sit one as a national logistics problem worth closing the airspace to solve. That gap says something about how much a single afternoon can carry when a whole society agrees it matters.