2024 CSAT produces one perfect scorer after removing ‘killer questions’

The 2024 College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) held for the first time after the government decided to eliminate "killer (extremely difficult) questions" showed a perceived difficulty level higher than the previous year in Korean, Mathematics, and English, marking an unprecedented level of difficulty. The authorities responsible for test preparation analyzed that various challenging questions were introduced instead of "killer questions," enhancing the discriminatory power for top performers. However, there are complaints that some questions were still as torturous as "killer questions," leading to continued controversy.

The results of the 2024 CSAT, conducted on Nov. 16, were announced on Thursday by the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE). The highest standard scores by subject were 150 for Korean and 148 for Mathematics, with Korean scoring two points higher. By contrast, last year's scores were 134 for Korean and 145 for Mathematics.

Particularly, the perceived difficulty level of Korean showed a significant increase compared to the relatively straightforward questions from the previous year. The highest standard score for Korean was the highest since the introduction of the current CSAT system in 2005, along with the year 2019, reaching 150 points. Standard scores indicate how much an individual's score differs from the overall average of test-takers. The highest standard scores will rise if the test is challenging and the average score is low. Generally, if the highest standard score is 140 points or higher, the test is considered difficult in the education industry.

For English, which is tested through absolute evaluation, the proportion of students achieving a level 1 grade (raw score of 90 or higher) was 4.71% (20,843 students) among all test-takers, a decrease of about 14,000 students compared to last year's 7.83% (34,830 students). This marks the lowest level since the introduction of absolute evaluation in the 2018 academic year.

In the education sector, it is analyzed that the government's policy of excluding "killer questions" increased the perceived difficulty level for the CSAT this year. In June, President Yoon Suk Yeol instructed to exclude “killer questions” outside the curriculum from the CSAT. However, test-takers interpreted this instruction as a sign of an "easy" test, anticipating a much lower difficulty level. Nevertheless, to ensure discrimination, questions of high difficulty similar to killer questions were introduced, causing confusion among test-takers given choices that were difficult to distinguish from correct answers, according to analysts in the education industry.

In this historically difficult CSAT, only one student achieved a perfect score across all sections. The student, identified as a female graduate of Yongin Foreign Language High School, selected two subjects in the natural sciences. While there were up to 33 perfect scorers in 2014, the introduction of the integrated CSAT for both liberal arts and sciences in the 2022 academic year resulted in only one perfect scorer, and last year saw three.


Sung-Min Park min@donga.com