Here in South Korea, it’s not a thing except exceptional circumstances. Those that do get held back a year are severe fuckups (e.g. skipped half the school year or something), though there have been talks of making the practice more widespread.

7 comments

  1. They are rare but happen. If the child misses enough that they can’t be advanced to the next grade or if they are behind in learning.

  2. It exists, but it’s not widespread. The most common time to repeat a grade is very early, like kindergarten, because the kid wasn’t quite developmentally ready to move to 1st grade.

  3. It’s relatively common for kids to be held back one year, but not more. It’s usually in kindergarten or first grade. Maybe like 5% of kids where I work.

  5. It’s only common at very early ages, when it might be determined that the child isn’t mature enough to progress. I’ve known several people who had to repeat kindergarten.

    After that, very uncommon. When you get to high school, it’s not totally unheard of to have to repeat a class, if you failed it and it’s required to graduate, though. My best friend teaches high school in France and tells me that if a student fails a class they have to redo the entire year, including all the classes they didn’t fail. That is not how things work in the US. You can probably move on to the next year and just have to repeat the class. Also there are usually summer school options to redo it before the next school year starts.

  6. It’s very uncommon, but if you miss a really extreme number of school days it can happen.

  7. It may happen as a maturity thing in early years (maybe kindergarten… 5-7 years old maybe, and depending on your birthday) but as a result of poor grades it’s uncommon but there are other factors that may contribute beyond actual intelligence

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