High schools in South Korea will adopt a credit system from 2025 as initially planned that expands elective courses that students can enroll in as long as they earn enough credits to graduate.

The education ministry revealed the plan on Wednesday when it announced a set of measures to improve the competitiveness of public education.

The ministry, however, decided to keep the relative grading system for subjects in the first year of high school, after initially discussing the application of only an absolute grading method as a precondition for the stable implementation of the credit system.

Currently, high school grades in the first year are based on both absolute and relative evaluation systems, while only absolute evaluations are applied for second- and third-year students.

The ministry said it decided to not introduce an absolute method for grading first year students in a bid to secure credibility and fairness in evaluating a student’s performance.