South Korea's college entrance exam faces overhaul as education body begins nationwide consultations

South Korea's National Education Commission has begun gathering public input on a long-term overhaul of the college admissions system, with the possible introduction of essay and short-answer questions to the College Scholastic Ability Test emerging as a central issue.

The commission held a public forum on the future direction of college admissions at the Collabo MICE Convention Center in Incheon on Tuesday. Additional forums are scheduled for Gwangju on Aug. 20 and Daegu on Aug. 26. Each session will draw up to 100 participants per region, including students, parents, teachers and members of the commission's public participation committee.

The forums will focus on introducing essay and short-answer questions to the CSAT and shifting to an absolute grading system. Kim Dong-jin, a member of the commission's special committee on college admissions, will present on the direction of future admissions policy. Lee Min-seok, head of the education and talent division at the National AI Strategy Committee, will speak on AI-based essay and short-answer assessment. Participants will then break into small groups to discuss whether the current evaluation system remains appropriate and what shape a future admissions framework should take.

The commission is examining the introduction of essay and short-answer questions and a shift to absolute grading as part of a medium- to long-term admissions reform process, though no plan has been finalized. The issues were also flagged in a recent presidential briefing as subjects for future public deliberation.

If essay and short-answer questions are incorporated into the CSAT, ensuring the fairness and reliability of grading stands as the central challenge. Questions also remain over whether student responses can be evaluated consistently within a limited timeframe, and whether such a format would fuel private tutoring in essay writing or widen educational inequality.

The commission plans to follow the regional forums with deliberations by its public participation committee and an online opinion-gathering process. The resulting reform proposals will feed into a medium- to long-term national education development plan, which the commission expects to release in March next year.

"We need an education system that nurtures human creativity and critical thinking so that people can be active agents leading the AI era, and college admissions must align with that goal," commission chair Cha Jeong-in said. "After 33 years of entrenching a multiple-choice, answer-selection model, we need to reflect from the ground up on whether our current assessment approach and admissions system are still valid."