When One Exam Shook a Nation
The English section of South Korea’s College Scholastic Ability Test, known as the Suneung, has long been a battleground between educational idealism and harsh reality. In November 2025, that conflict erupted into a full-blown crisis when only 3.11 percent of the 630,000 test takers earned the top grade, Level 1, shattering records and expectations. Under the system of absolute grading introduced in 2018 to reduce student stress and curb costs of private education, roughly 7 percent of students were expected to achieve this highest mark. The result was not merely a statistical anomaly. It represented a systemic breakdown that forced the resignation of the nation’s top exam administrator, triggered a government investigation, and exposed deep flaws in how one of the world’s most important standardized tests is created.
The fallout was immediate and severe. Students who had prepared according to official guidelines found themselves locked out of opportunities for early admission at top universities. Parents flooded online forums with panic. Private academies, known as hagwons, reported a surge in enrollment inquiries within hours of the score release. The crisis threatened to undo years of government efforts to reduce the massive spending on private education in South Korea, which reached approximately 26 trillion won (about $19 billion USD) in 2024. On December 10, Oh Seung-geol, president of the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE), resigned to take responsibility for what officials termed a failure in difficulty control.
The resignation was historically significant. Of the 12 previous agency chiefs, only four had served out their full three-year terms, most departing over errors in specific test questions. Oh was the first to step down simply because an exam was deemed too difficult.
Breakdown at the Question Factory
An investigation by the Ministry of Education, conducted throughout December 2025, revealed a process of writing the test that had spun out of control. The findings, announced on February 11, painted a picture of rushed revisions and structural imbalances that compromised the integrity of the exam.
The most glaring issue was the volume of changes at the final stage. In the English section alone, 19 questions were completely rewritten shortly before the exam date. This contrasted starkly with the Korean language section, which saw just one rewrite, and the mathematics section, which had four. These sudden alterations left reviewers insufficient time to assess whether the new questions matched the public school curriculum or maintained appropriate difficulty levels.
When a question is written, there is a process in which reviewers submit their evaluations, but that did not occur smoothly. All 19 questions did go through reviewer evaluation, but because that process takes time, it appears to have affected difficulty checks.
The investigation also uncovered a troubling composition in the committee for writing English questions. Only 33 percent of the writers were active teachers currently working in schools, compared with an average of 45 percent across all sections. The remaining members were university professors and outside experts, a mix that critics say disconnected the exam from the reality of daily classroom instruction. Since 2024, writers had been randomly selected from a talent pool, but the ministry found that verification of their expertise after selection was inadequate.
Further complicating matters, the process of writing the test itself occurs under conditions that seem almost designed to induce errors. Writers are sequestered at private accommodation facilities for approximately 40 days, working in isolation to prevent leaks. This seclusion, while necessary for security, makes it difficult to maintain a stable working environment. Current protocols also restrict the use of artificial intelligence tools that could streamline the process, forcing writers to rely on manual methods for checking similarities between questions and predicting difficulty.
The Cram School Paradox
The 2025 English debacle struck at the heart of one of the most persistent educational dilemmas in South Korea. The system of absolute grading for English was introduced in 2018 specifically to reduce the obsession with private tutoring. Unlike the nine-tier system of relative grading used for other subjects, where students compete against each other for limited top slots, absolute grading was supposed to allow students to achieve top marks through public education alone if they mastered the curriculum. Instead, the extreme difficulty had the opposite effect.
Parents immediately returned to the private academies they had hoped to avoid. Online communities like DSchool saw desperate posts from mothers asking which hagwon could salvage the college prospects of their children. One parent wrote that they were considering sending their 11th grade daughter to additional classes after focusing primarily on math and science. Another added that the results showed it is impossible to overlook English when choosing private academies.
The crisis exposed a growing divide between Seoul and the provinces. In rural areas like South Jeolla Province, where access to elite private tutoring is limited, the impact was devastating. One high school there reported that none of its 74 students achieved Level 1, effectively shutting them out of tracks for early admission at prestigious universities. Officials from the Gwangju Metropolitan Education Office warned that the purpose of absolute grading was to level the playing field, but without strengthened public education, students in rural areas would fall further behind their affluent counterparts in the capital.
The purpose of the absolute grading scale is to allow students to prepare for college entrance with public education alone. If we do not strengthen public education, students in rural areas will be at a disadvantage.
Kim Joo-hyung, deputy head of Gwangju Daeseong D-Quantum academy, confirmed the rush for remedial help. He told reporters that even students performing at the top unexpectedly received lower grades in English and failed to meet minimum requirements for admission. He noted that consultation calls began the moment score reports were released.
The Killer Question Dilemma
To understand why the English section veered so far off track, one must examine the peculiar pressures facing Suneung question writers. For decades, the exam has been famous for killer questions so difficult that even university professors struggle to solve them within the time limit. These items, with correct answer rates below 20 percent, effectively function as statistical guesses, yet they serve a political purpose in a country where university rankings determine social mobility.
In June 2023, former President Yoon Suk Yeol attempted to reform the system by ordering the exclusion of killer questions from the exam. The intervention backfired. Unable to eliminate difficult questions entirely without losing the ability to differentiate top students for medical school admissions, writers instead created what insiders call questions of secondary difficulty. These items are slightly easier than traditional killers but feature twisted logic, wordplay, and attractive distractors designed to trap even well-prepared students.
Sung Ki-sun, a professor at the Catholic University of Korea and former KICE president from 2017 to 2021, described this as a balloon effect. He explained that even if the questions of super-high difficulty disappear, the exam committee still has to maintain the overall difficulty level. Therefore, the number of high-difficulty questions increased from around seven to twelve or thirteen. The 2024 exam, the first after the order from Yoon, became one of the most difficult on record, with only one perfect scorer nationwide.
The English section faces additional unique pressures. Because the state-run educational broadcaster EBS provides workbooks that are supposed to align with the exam, writers must twist EBS-sourced passages significantly to prevent the answers from being too obvious to students who have memorized the materials. This creates a paradox where public education resources are used, but the questions derived from them become increasingly convoluted.
Complicating matters further, the exam committee must review 400 to 500 commercial workbooks from cram schools to ensure no question overlaps with private academy materials. If a similarity is found, the question must be discarded and rewritten, often at the last minute. Oh Seung-geol admitted that the spike in difficulty on the 2025 English exam resulted partly from rushing to replace questions deemed too similar to commercial mock tests.
Reforms and the Long Road Ahead
In response to the crisis, Education Minister Choi Kyo-jin announced a sweeping overhaul of the process for writing the test. The reforms address both human resources and institutional infrastructure. Starting with the next exam cycle, at least half of all writers for the English section must be active teachers, ensuring that classroom realities inform the design of questions. The ministry will also consolidate the fragmented review committees into integrated Question Review Committees for each subject, streamlining the five to six levels of review that each question currently undergoes.
Stable test setting is essential to building trust in the college admissions system. Through these improvements, we aim to create a predictable and trustworthy Suneung system so that students who put in the effort within public education can be evaluated fairly.
Artificial intelligence will play a central role in the new system. The ministry plans to pilot a system for generating English passages based on AI in the 2028 mock exam, designed to reduce development time and avoid copyright issues. Eventually, AI will handle predictions of difficulty and checks of similarity between questions, potentially preventing the last minute scrambles that plagued the 2025 exam. A dedicated facility for writing the test, tentatively named the Education Assessment and Test Development Support Center, will open by 2030 to replace the current ad-hoc private accommodations.
These technical fixes, however, may not address the fundamental questions about the future of the exam. Seoul Metropolitan Education Office Superintendent Jung Geun-sik has proposed a radical timeline to abolish the Suneung entirely by 2040, replacing it with holistic student record evaluations and assessments based on essays. His three-stage plan would begin with expanding absolute grading to all subjects by 2028, introduce more essay questions by 2033, and eventually eliminate the standardized test as the primary criterion for admission.
The proposal reflects demographic realities. By 2040, the population of high school aged students in South Korea is expected to shrink by half, reducing the need for a sorting mechanism of high stakes. It also acknowledges that formats of multiple choice may be obsolete in an era when artificial intelligence can achieve Level 1 scores in mathematics within fifteen minutes.
Whether these changes can break the dependency of South Korea on private education remains uncertain. The crisis of 2025 demonstrated that even reforms that were well meant can backfire when the underlying pressure to differentiate students for elite university admissions remains unchanged. For now, students and parents face another year of uncertainty, wondering whether the next Suneung will finally deliver on the promise of fair, predictable evaluation.
Key Points
- Only 3.11 percent of test takers earned top grades in the November 2025 Suneung English section, compared to the expected 7 percent rate
- Investigation found 19 English questions were rewritten at the last minute, leaving insufficient time for verification of difficulty
- Just 33 percent of English test writers were active teachers, well below the 45 percent average across other subjects
- Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation President Oh Seung-geol resigned on December 10, 2025, taking responsibility for the failure of difficulty control
- The crisis drove students back to private cram schools, undermining the goal of the system of absolute grading to reduce education costs
- Reforms include requiring 50 percent active teachers on the English committee and piloting AI for generating questions in 2028
- Proposals to abolish the Suneung entirely by 2040 are now under serious consideration by education authorities
