2024 CSAT excludes non-curriculum 'killer questions'

The 2024 College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), conducted on Thursday, has been evaluated as maintaining its discriminatory power in Korean language and math sections, even with the exclusion of ‘killer’ questions. The Korean language section was perceived to be more difficult than last year's CSAT and the mock assessment in September, which featured relatively easier questions. Similarly, the math section was slightly more challenging than the September mock evaluation, where at least 2,520 individuals achieved perfect scores. Still, it remained comparable to the difficulty level of last year's CSAT.

The recent CSAT marked the inaugural college entrance exam following President Yoon Suk Yeol's directive in June to "exclude non-curriculum 'killer questions' from the CSAT." There were apprehensions that the removal of these challenging questions, which traditionally played a role in differentiating top performers, might lead to the perception of an 'easy CSAT.' Concerns were further raised as the September CSAT mock evaluation saw perfect scores in the mathematics section, potentially diminishing the test's ability to distinguish top-performing students effectively.

Upon reviewing the released CSAT questions, educators and private education companies commented, “The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE) appears to have made efforts to address previous criticisms.” Notably, last year's CSAT featured a relatively easy Korean language section, resulting in an 11-point gap in the highest scores between Korean and math standard scores. It is speculated that this year's CSAT intentionally increased the difficulty of the Korean language section, considering the need to balance the difficulty levels between subjects. The highest score among the standard scores serves as an indicator of subject difficulty, with a higher score suggesting a more challenging test.

In the mathematics section, rather than introducing a significant difficulty escalation, the emphasis on discriminatory power was achieved by making Question No. 22 of the common subject more challenging. This decision stemmed from the observation that, despite numerous perfect scores in the mock eval‎uation held in September, it was challenging to further raise the overall difficulty of the mathematics section, especially given the similarity in the grade 1 cutoff score to that of last year's CSAT. "Increasing the difficulty of multiple-choice questions impacts the perceived difficulty for all test-takers," said Lim Seong-ho, CEO of Jongno Academy. "Hence, one subjective question was deliberately made more challenging to evaluate the aptitude level among top students and curtail the number of individuals achieving perfect scores."


Ye-Na Choi yena@donga.com