Testing Times: A Structure/Agency Perspective on Becoming a Science Teacher in a Competitive, Exam‐Based Teacher Selection System

ABSTRACT

While extensive research exists on science teacher shortages, less attention has been directed toward countries facing the opposite challenge: an oversupply of science teachers. This study examines the experiences of prospective science teachers in South Korea, where passing a high‐stakes, annual competitive examination is a prerequisite for securing a public school position. Drawing on interviews, study group observations, and exam artifacts, we identify key structural conditions and illustrate how the structure of the teacher selection system interacts with participants' envisioned science teacher identities and shapes their agentive strategies. We show that candidates' experiences are shaped by structural features such as the exam's emphasis on hierarchical disciplinary knowledge, procedural opacity, and competitive intensity, which condition how the exam is interpreted as legitimate, irrelevant, or merely instrumental. In response, candidates adopt contrasting strategies—ranging from adaptive alignment and pragmatic distancing to strategic optimization—that either reinforce or selectively disengage from the system's normative expectations. These strategies, in turn, interact with candidates' envisioned professional identities, influencing whether the exam is integrated into, bracketed from, or decoupled from their understandings of what it means to become a science teacher. Our findings illustrate how individual agency can reproduce the structural conditions of science teacher selection while also questioning its legitimacy within candidates' informal preparation practices, offering new insights into science teacher agency and identity‐in‐the‐making within an underexplored, exam‐based selection context.