Korean language section harder than June test, analysts say of Sept. mock CSAT

The Korean language section of the September mock College Scholastic Ability Test for the 2027 academic year, held Wednesday, was harder than the June mock exam but comparable in difficulty to last year's September mock, analysts said.

EBS released its trend analysis after the Korean language section ended Wednesday, saying the September mock was similar in difficulty to last year's September mock and harder than this year's June mock.

On the overall difficulty of the Korean language section, EBS said the exam "maintained the trends seen in last year's CSAT and this year's June mock while faithfully reflecting the achievement standards of the 2015 revised curriculum and core concepts from textbooks." It added that while the passages provided sufficient information to answer questions, items requiring students to precisely understand the meaning of answer choices and arrive at correct answers through inference appeared across both the common and elective sections.

In the reading comprehension section, question 8 — which asked students to apply the concepts of "person" and "person species" to two passages on speciesism — and question 13, which required applying the operating principles of an adapter to specific cases, were identified as particularly challenging. Both questions required students to accurately connect information from the passage and supplementary material to evaluate the appropriateness of each answer choice.

In the literature section, question 24, which asked students to assess two works' perception of reality and the meaning of poetic lines based on supplementary material, and question 31, which linked the crisis of farmers who lost their hometowns during the Japanese colonial period to character relationships within a work, were rated as relatively difficult.

Among the elective subjects, question 45 in the speech and writing section — which asked how to use supplementary materials to strengthen a draft op-ed for a local newspaper — and question 39 in the language and media section, which required analyzing sentence components and the structure of complex sentences in actual sentences, were singled out as strong differentiators.

The EBS linkage rate stood at 51.1%, with 23 of the 45 total questions tied to EBS materials. In the reading comprehension section, passages on integrated humanities topics and science, technology and social themes drew on core concepts and subject matter from EBS textbooks. Three of the six literary works in the literature section were linked to EBS materials. The speech and writing and language and media sections also incorporated question types and core concepts from EBS textbooks.

EBS advised students to "thoroughly study the core concepts covered in the curriculum, practice comprehensively understanding and drawing inferences from information given in passages," and to familiarize themselves with the problem-solving principles found in EBS-linked textbooks and past CSAT questions released by the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation.