September CSAT Mock Assessment Begins; Private-Education Test-Solving Techniques Excluded and EBS Linkage Made More Noticeable

[Financial News] The September mock assessment, which will indicate the difficulty of the 2027 College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), is being administered nationwide from 8:40 a.m. on the 2nd at 2,162 high schools, including education offices, and 574 designated academies. The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE) said in a press release outlining the test-setting direction that it had excluded questions dependent on private-education test-solving techniques and strengthened the perceived linkage with the Educational Broadcasting System (EBS).
KICE said, "We excluded questions that favor students who have learned test-solving techniques through private education and practiced them repeatedly, and evenly selected questions of an appropriate difficulty level to maintain differentiation within the scope of public education." It explained that the test focused on essential and fundamental content covered in the school curriculum to help normalize high school education. To ensure high validity, KICE also made some changes to the format and approach of questions, even when the content had appeared in previous tests. The test-setting criteria also included measuring students' understanding of basic concepts, application skills and comprehensive thinking abilities needed for university education.
The linkage with EBS, which is highly noticeable to test takers, was maintained at around 50% based on the number of questions in each subject area and course. However, the test made active use of charts, illustrations and passages from EBS textbooks to increase the practical sense of linkage students experience at the test site.
The Korean Language and English sections used passages and materials on a variety of topics. Mathematics, Social Studies and Science Inquiry, Vocational Education Inquiry, and Second Foreign Language and Classical Chinese focused on assessing thinking skills suited to the characteristics of each subject. KICE also said it had worked to minimize any potential advantages or disadvantages arising from elective-subject choices in sections with elective subjects. Korean History, a required subject, was presented at a relatively straightforward level and focused on key content to assess basic knowledge.
In this test, the Korean Language, Mathematics and Vocational Education Inquiry sections follow a common-subject-plus-elective-subject structure. The Social Studies and Science Inquiry sections use an integrated CSAT system in which students choose up to two subjects from 17. English, Korean History, and Second Foreign Language and Classical Chinese are administered under criterion-referenced assessment.

[email protected] Man-gi Kim Reporter