Why are Koreans so pedantic?

One of the mainstays of the Korean course so far has been the "dreaded" 받아쓰기badasseugi, better known as a dictation in English. We get dictated 10 sentences at random speeds which we have to write down. These sentences all come from the textbook, either from the selection of example sentences or from the dialogues. So the most studious of students just memorise the lot. According to the teacher, the purpose of this test is to improve writing and spelling.

The total score is out of 10 and even the smallest mistake means the whole sentence is wrong. This is something which has always baffled me. Because of the time constraints and speed writing a learner of a foreign language is naturally going to make silly mistakes ie: -먄-myan instead of -면-myeon. I know how to spell that, I just was in an unnatural situation and lost concentration! Yet they never take this into account.

Yesterday though there was a small mark on the paper, which appeared to change 니까-nikka to 나까-nakka / looks worse in English doesn't it?. An equally silly mistake, however the fact is that with a little bit of inspection it was obvious that this was just a mark. The teacher was looking so hard for mistakes, that even when they weren't there she found them. By focusing on this kind of error it shows that she is expecting students to make mistakes, whatever the reason! If they were actually testing spelling, then surely they should focus on difficult to spell words like the cursed "괜찮아"gwaenchana / it's ok instead?

As a teacher doing this kind of task, I would take away marks accordingly, accounting for the different kind of mistakes. But in Korea wrong is wrong, no discussion, justification and to the Westerner it seems just overly pedantic.

But in a way, they do have a point, even the silliest and smallest errors can cause confusion, at the very least! But why be so intolerant in such a controlled environment? Why the lack of task focusing?

I can think of a few reasons:

• Historical: When Koreans wrote in Chinese characters, even the smallest mistake can totally change the meaning of a whole word, not like a spelling mistake which often just looks weird. This tradition of learning and teaching has been inherited by modern Korean.
• Linguistic: Korean, in it's nature is very "pedantic" There are literally thousands and thousands of words which have extremely specific meanings. You don't know that word and you can't say the phrase. Same with the endings that they use. There are many different endings which have extremely specific, one off, meanings: You use it wrong and you can insult someone. So be careful from the beginning.
• Cultural: Mistakes are seen differently here. People will go to extreme lengths to avoid making a mistake, to the extent that they will actually remain silent when they don't know the answer to a question. Extremely rude in Western culture, totally normal here.

Perhaps then, by our standards, Koreans are "pedantic" when it comes to tests, but this is clearly just a cultural perspective. They find it equally difficult and confusing when an English native-speaker is completely "tolerant" of even the smallest mistakes they make! Finally a lasting testament to Korean accuracy can be seen in the Tripitaka Koreana, a collection of Buddhist texts written in Hanja: 52,382,960 chinese characters and not one error!