[News Today] 2026 CSAT evaluated as difficult

[LEAD]
The results of the 2026 College Scholastic Ability Test, also known as Suneung are in. They show that Korean and English were especially difficult this year. The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation has admitted it failed to control the difficulty of the English test.

[REPORT]
In this year's College Scholastic Ability Test, also known as Suneung, one of the most difficult questions was question number 33 on the English test.

It was an inference-based fill-in-the-blank question about building design. More than 80% of the students failed to find the correct answer.

As high-error-rate questions like this increased, the percentage of students who scored 90 points or above and received Grade 1 in English dropped to just 3.11%.

This is the lowest percentage of Grade 1 students since absolute grading system for English was introduced in the 2018 academic year, making this year's CSAT extremely challenging.

The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation admitted to having failed to adjust the difficulty level of the English test.

Oh Seung-keol / Dir., Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation
The results fell short of our original purpose and intentions and we regret this.

The Korean language test was as difficult as English.

The highest standard score in Korean, which rises when the test is harder, reached 147 points, up 8 points from last year.

The highest standard score in math was 139 points, the lowest level on record.

The number of students who received perfect scores in all subjects also fell from 11 last year to five this year.

Admissions experts predict that with the low percentage of test-takers who received Grade 1 in English, many students will likely fail to meet the minimum CSAT grade requirements for early admissions.

Woo Yeon-chul / Jinhaksa Admissions Strategy Research Institute
Some universities use English test scores as a bonus and others as a penalty. College application rates could change accordingly.

The CSAT score reports were distributed to the test-takers on Friday.

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