Korean Question 14 and Math Question 22? ... Interest in 'Killer Questions' the Government Will Publicly Target

Most Korean Language Questions with High Error Rates Linked to EBS
Math Questions Slightly Easier than Existing Killer Questions

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Lee Ju-ho announced that in next week's announcement of private education measures, he will analyze and disclose the 'killer questions' that appeared in the June mock exam and the past three years of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), drawing renewed attention to the questions from the June mock exam.

Students preparing for the September mock exam. The photo is unrelated to the article content.
[Photo by Joint Photo Coverage Team]

According to the preliminary scoring of the June mock exam by about 91,000 test-takers on EBSi, an online education site operated by the Korea Educational Broadcasting System on the 23rd, the question with the highest incorrect answer rate in the Korean language section was Non-fiction question number 14, with a correct answer rate of 36.4%.

Question 14 involved reading two passages: passage (A), which dealt with various perspectives explaining consciousness in psychological philosophy, and passage (B), which criticized the objective philosophy's theory of perception and argued that perception is bodily experience.

June Mock Test Korean Language Section Questions 12 to 17 Passage [Photo by Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation website]

To solve the question, one had to fully understand both philosophy-related passages, which are not commonly encountered, leading to predictions that it would most closely fit the 'killer question' pointed out by President Yoon Suk-yeol. However, the passages were linked to those appearing in the EBS CSAT Special Lecture reading textbook.

Next, the questions with low correct answer rates were Literature question number 33 and Non-fiction question number 9, with correct answer rates of 36.8% and 40.2%, respectively.

However, the poem "Maengse" by poet Jo Ji-hoon, which appeared in question 33, was linked to the EBS CSAT Special Lecture literature textbook, and the content about "Components of Solid Catalysts" in question 9 was also explained in detail with graphs in the CSAT Special Lecture reading textbook, making it difficult to consider these as killer questions.

In the mathematics section, the last subjective question of the common subject, question number 22, had the lowest correct answer rate at 2.9%.

June Mock Test Mathematics Section Question 22 [Photo by Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation website]

This question was designed to check whether one could find a cubic function satisfying given conditions by using derivatives and considering the function's maxima and minima to calculate the differential coefficient. An EBS math instructor evaluated that the conditions were not very difficult.

The next lowest correct answer rate among the common subjects was for subjective question number 21, with a correct answer rate of 10%.

June Mock Test Mathematics Section Question 21 [Photo by Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation website]

Usually, true/false questions are presented in multiple-choice format, but this time they were modified to assign values based on true or false and then sum those values.

However, both questions 21 and 22 were analyzed to be somewhat easier than the traditional killer questions, which typically had correct answer rates in the 1% range.

Due to the evaluation that the June mock exam was somewhat moderate in difficulty, the education community is paying closer attention to which questions the Ministry of Education will designate as killer questions from the June mock exam.

Earlier, the Ministry of Education claimed that it did not follow President Yoon Suk-yeol's directive to exclude areas not covered in the public education curriculum from the CSAT, and decided to dismiss the responsible director and conduct an audit of the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation.

The June mock exam score reports have not yet been delivered to students, and the scores are scheduled to be released on the 28th.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.