At the June mock evaluation for the 2027 academic year College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) held on the 4th, the Korean and math sections were analyzed to have been set easier than the CSAT last year. Evaluations of the English section, which had led the CSAT last year to be labeled a ‘killer CSAT’, were divided. EBS analyzed it as being at a moderate level, but the admissions industry projected that the difficulty still remained high and that the share of Grade 1 could stay around 3%.

At a briefing at Government Complex Sejong that day, Kim Jin-seok, a teacher at Somyeong Girls High School from the EBS field teachers group, said of this June mock evaluation, “Although there are some differences by section, the overall difficulty is similar to or somewhat easier than the CSAT last year,” and evaluated, “Items that depart from the curriculum were excluded, and the trend in question setting in the mock evaluations and the CSAT last year was consistently maintained.”

The Korean section was set more moderately than the CSAT last year. Han Byeong-hun, EBS lead Korean instructor and a teacher at Yesan Girls High School, analyzed, “The amount of information in the passages was appropriate, the structures were not complex, and the information needed to solve the items could be sufficiently identified within the passages.” He cited Question 13 in Reading (information asymmetry), Question 15 (Laplace equation), and Questions 20 and 24 in Literature as representative discriminator items.

The math section was presented at a level similar to the CSAT last year. Nam Chi-yeol, EBS lead math instructor and a teacher at Baekseok High School, analyzed, “There were items that required the ability to understand and analyze comprehensively, so some questions may have felt somewhat tricky, but overall the level was similar to the CSAT last year.” In the common subject, Questions 22 and 21 were analyzed as key discriminator items. Question 22 asked examinees to discover the principle of a sequence defined inductively, and Question 21 required inferring the relationship between a cubic function and a quadratic function.

For these two sections, the admissions industry also offered similar analyses. Jongro Academy assessed, “Korean and math, which could be considered of appropriate difficulty last year, were set easier, so compared with the CSAT last year, discrimination may be reduced.”

However, the admissions industry believes test-takers perceived difficulty in the English section likely remained high. Jongro Academy analyzed, “It was set very difficult, to the extent that the share of Grade 1 in English is estimated at around 3.5%,” and “almost the same level as the 3.1% in the CSAT last year.” Kim Byung-jin, head of the Etoos Educational Assessment Research Institute, also said, “In English, the passages were long and many difficult words appeared, so the difficulty felt in the test room is expected to have been quite high.”

In this June mock evaluation, 96,931 repeat takers, including graduates, participated, the largest number on record. For the main CSAT, with the regional doctor system applied for the first time and with changes to the admissions system, the inflow of graduates is likely to expand further, so there are predictions that cut-off forecasts could become even more difficult.

The ‘satam-run’ phenomenon, in which students concentrate on social studies subjects to aim for high scores, is also cited as a major variable. On this, teacher Kim Jin-seok said, “Choosing social studies does not automatically confer an advantage,” and “As many students flock to social studies, competition intensifies, while in science inquiry, those in the middle range can achieve sufficiently good results with only a little effort.”