The Best Paper Award Ceremony is an event jointly held every semester by the College of Cultural Science and KAIST’s English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Program. The event rewards students who have submitted outstanding reports for the courses offered by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. This semester’s ceremony was held on September 20 in the International Conference Room of the School of Humanities and Social Science Building to recognize the students who took their courses during the Spring Semester of 2011.
During the ceremony, the award for best paper was presented to two groups—Chang Wook Lee and Joon Hyub Lee, who wrote Stock Price Analysis Yoosung Enterprise Co., Ltd.: Behavioral mechanisms behind stock price increase despite bad news of workers strike, and Jooyoung Chang and Seahyung Park, the title of whose report is A comparison of English education in Korea and Germany.
In their paper, Chang Wook Lee and Joon Hyub Lee analyze how the labor force’s strike surprisingly led to a sharp increase in the stock prices of Yoosung Enterprise Co., Ltd. To explain this unusual phenomenon, the writers account for the fact that the public previously failed to recognize the value of Yoosung Enterprise before the strike was widely reported by the mass media. Yoosung Enterprise is one of only two companies in Korea that produce piston rings, a crucial component of automobiles. The authors conclude in their report that Efficient Market Hypothesis does not always work in real-world markets and that it is crucial to study behavioral mechanisms to succeed in investment strategies.
As for the other best paper, Jooyoung Chang and Seahyung Park compare and contrast the English education systems in Germany and Korea to reveal problems associated with domestic English education. Along with a high population density in classes and a lack of emphasis on developing speaking and writing skills, Chang and Park describe several other reasons why students in Korea feel more skeptical about the importance of learning English as they get older and enter the final years of secondary education.
Apart from those two groups, nine other students were given Honorable Mention for their papers. The students are: Dong Hyuk Kim, Yilho Moon, Hanyong Lee, Park Chang Hwan, DaeHee Hwang, Geunhong Park, Hyunjin Park, Jeeyoon Jung and Chung Doh Hoon.