South Korean college entrance examination candidates face heightened confusion following severe volatility in English section difficulty levels, moving from 3.11 percent achieving top grades in the previous year to sharp fluctuations in recent mock tests, woman.donga.com reported.
Last year’s English test proved exceptionally difficult despite its absolute grading system, causing numerous students to miss minimum academic criteria required for university admissions. That trend persisted into the June mock evaluation with a 4.13 percent top-tier rate, before a sudden reversal in early September brought significantly easier passages and a much higher perceived ease among test-takers.
To unpack what these swings mean for the upcoming examination, woman.donga.com spoke with Kim Chi-sam, director of KNS English Academy in Daechi-dong, who has spent twenty years running English programs and previously coached students who were top of their class at Daewon, Daeil, and Hanyoung Foreign Language High Schools.
Shifting Difficulty and the Core Test of Reading Literacy
Students noticed a distinct drop in difficulty during the September mock assessment compared to the broad humanities subjects—such as Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of law—featured in the previous official exam. Examiners instead utilized more familiar, everyday contexts while maintaining intricate logical structures designed to test true comprehension rather than mere surface-level recognition.
Director Kim noted that the evaluation board typically aims for roughly seven percent of candidates achieving a top grade, viewing ten percent as an optimal success rate. Because recent rates plummeted to three and four percent, sparking widespread academic debate, examiners pulled back in September to align with government directives against overly punishing tests, though they preserved rigorous logic requirements through challenging fill-in-the-blank inference questions.
| Examination Event | Top-Tier (Grade 1) Rate | Observed Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Previous Official CSAT | 3.11% | Extremely difficult, heavy humanities and philosophy content, widespread minimum criteria failures. |
| June Mock Evaluation | 4.13% | Complex sentence structures, continued high difficulty. |
| September Mock Evaluation | Significantly higher (Easier) | Familiar daily themes paired with tricky logical inference questions to test real comprehension. |
Sustained success on the English exam requires strong reading literacy rather than casual conversational fluency. Students who read extensively during childhood frequently secure top marks without intensive high school preparation, relying on strong foundational logic, vocabulary, and grammar acquired over years of practice.
Candidates Should Prioritize Topic Sentences and Modern Vocabulary
As test day approaches, candidates must maintain daily vocabulary acquisition, specifically targeting contemporary topics like artificial intelligence, climate change, and environmental science. Examiners frequently couple these accessible modern subjects with complex logic inversions, making it dangerous for students to rely only on the first few sentences of a passage. The most important thing is the ability to grasp the topic sentence,
Director Kim explained, advising students to practice finding and summarizing topic sentences while warning against abandoning the habit of reading passages to the very end.
Listening comprehension is directly tied to reading speed and processing capability. Students struggling with audio sections should practice dictation and shadowing techniques, while remembering to immediately abandon missed audio cues during the actual exam rather than dwelling on them and sacrificing subsequent questions.
