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On the 13th, when the 2026 CSAT is held, a cheering rally to encourage test-takers is under way at Daeseong High School, the 8th test site in District 55 of the North Chungcheong Office of Education. Yonhap News

On the 13th, when the 2026 academic year College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) is administered, the confinement-like period for CSAT item writers and reviewers also ends after about 40 days.

According to the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, about 500 CSAT item writers and reviewers and around 200 people in charge of administrative tasks such as operations, meals, and security, totaling just over 700, have been living together since the 7th of last month through today, now the 38th day. When the fifth session, for the Second Foreign Language/Chinese Characters section (5:05 p.m.∼45 p.m.), ends, their de facto confinement will be lifted.

The item writers and reviewers, selected at random by drawing from a pool of incumbent professors and teachers secured in advance by the institute, stayed at an undisclosed location and composed the CSAT questions. Although the writing was completed in early this month, going out was restricted during the residential period, and communication devices such as mobile phones or Bluetooth earphones could not be used at all.

They had to live completely cut off from the outside for more than a month, and the pressure to produce discriminating items and the burden that not even the slightest error could be allowed likely caused considerable stress. In particular, as last year, there was likely a heavy burden to exclude killer items while still enhancing differentiation among top performers.

The ‘CSAT Item-Setting Inspection Committee’, composed of around 20 incumbent teachers, was tasked with focusing on checking for killer items. They also lived on-site for 37 days together with the item writers and reviewers. The institute has emphasized, “We exclude items that favor students who have learned test-taking techniques and trained repetitively through private education, and we set a balanced spread of items at an appropriate level of difficulty so that differentiation can be achieved using only content covered in public education.”