Contradiction of the CSAT Excluding 'Killer Questions'... Perfect Scorers Are from Famous 'Killer Specialist' Academies

Perfect Scorer from Seoul Daechi-dong Re-study Academy Student
Deputy Minister of Education: "Securing Discrimination Without Killer Questions"

The only perfect scorer in all subjects of the 2024 College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) was identified as a repeat test taker at a Daechi-dong academy famous for intensive training on ultra-difficult questions (so-called killer questions).

On the 8th, Academy A in Daechi-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, confirmed that Yuria, a graduate of the Korean Foreign Language University-affiliated High School in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province (Yongin Oegwae Bu High School), who achieved a perfect score this year, was indeed one of their students.

On the day of the 2024 College Scholastic Ability Test, examinees are waiting for the exam to start at Ewha Girls' Foreign Language High School in Jung-gu, Seoul.
[Photo by Joint Press Corps]

The test authorities had emphasized that killer questions would be excluded from this year’s CSAT, yet a contradictory situation arose where the perfect scorers were students attending Daechi-dong repeat academies.

Academy A is known for selectively accepting top-tier repeat students aiming for medical school admissions, gaining recognition by having its students repeatedly practice killer questions created by freshmen of prestigious universities. It is also known that President Yoon Suk-yeol mentioned this academy in relation to the 'private education cartel,' and in October, the police conducted a search related to allegations that active teachers had received tens of millions of won over several years from large entrance exam academies.

The issue of whether killer questions were included remains controversial. This year’s CSAT had a review committee composed of active teachers who inspected the test questions for killer questions during the preparation process, and EBS instructors who analyzed the questions on the test day evaluated that 'there were no killer questions.' However, there was significant opposition. In a survey conducted by the secondary school teachers’ union targeting 2,278 active teachers responsible for CSAT subjects, 75.5% responded that 'there were killer questions,' and the civic group Education Concern-Free Society claimed that six math questions were killer questions.

Grading results showed that the Korean, Math, and English sections were all more challenging for top-tier examinees compared to last year. In the Korean section, the 'highest standard score,' which typically rises when the test is difficult, increased by 16 points compared to last year’s CSAT. The math section was slightly more difficult than last year’s already challenging test, and the English section had the lowest percentage of first-grade scores since the introduction of absolute grading.

On the 8th, Oh Seok-hwan, the newly appointed Vice Minister of Education, told reporters at the Ministry of Education in the Government Complex Sejong that this year’s CSAT "proved that it is possible to maintain the discriminative power of the test system without including killer questions," adding, "Instead of debating whether the test was easy or difficult, we will establish a stable test system with discriminative power without killer questions and prepare a public education system that can face the future."

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