SEOUL, Nov. 18 (Yonhap) -- More than 700,000 high school students and graduates in South Korea took the nation's college entrance exam on Thursday, as the government enforced traffic control and anti-noise measures to ensure that the most crucial test in a student's life was executed without any glitches.

The day-long standardized College Scholastic Ability Test is administered at 1,206 test centers across the country, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said, adding that the number of applicants was up 5 percent from the previous year, at 712,227.