earticle

영어

Many South Korean universities highly value and place much investment on the development of students' characteristics as their core competency, offering corresponding educational initiatives and programs. The present study specifically evaluated the level of characteristic competency among freshmen at C University, in which characteristic development is at the central to the institution's core competency. The researchers conducted the study to utilize the findings to inform the design of liberal arts courses and extracurricular programs. The study recruited 210 freshmen at C University in Changwon, South Korea. To ensure anonymity of the respondents, an online questionnaire was administered during the data collection period (i.e., between December 5th and 7th, 2022) with a total of 201 faithful responses finally analyzed. The results showed an average characteristic competency level of 4.21 out of 5 among the freshman participants. Notably, the highest score was ranked in the 'righteous domain' (4.27±0.66), whereas the 'behavioral domain' scored the lowest (4.08±0.77). These findings provide valuable insights for the development of educational programs that aim to promote characteristic competency among university students. The implications of the findings are further discussed.