The last nationwide mock exam for high school seniors will be held on the 20th, one month before the College Scholastic Ability Test for the 2027 academic year. With English difficulty diverging sharply between the June and September trial exams and a growing shift away from science electives, the test is expected to give students a chance to gauge their exam readiness and identify weak areas.
A total of 372,000 students from 1,855 high schools nationwide will sit the exam, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education said on the 19th. In Seoul, 64,000 students at 263 schools will take the test. The exam runs from 8:40 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. across five periods. Individual score reports will be provided on Nov. 5 after processing by the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation.
The exam follows the same format as the CSAT, scheduled for Nov. 19. Korean and mathematics are divided into common and elective subjects, and Korean history is a required section. The test covers Korean, mathematics, English, Korean history, social and natural sciences, and second foreign languages and classical Chinese, excluding Arabic I and Vietnamese I.
"The questions were designed to assess creative thinking and problem-solving ability while staying faithful to the school curriculum," an official at the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education said. "We excluded the most difficult questions so that students who have kept up with their classes can solve them."
Difficulty levels by section are seen as a key variable in this year's CSAT. For English, the share of students in the top grade band fell to 3.11% in last year's CSAT, the lowest since the subject moved to absolute grading, and came in at just 4.13% in this year's June trial exam. In the September trial, however, it jumped to 15.54%, a sharp swing in difficulty. In Korean, the top standard score in the September trial was 144, up 12 points from 132 in June. The top standard score in mathematics in the September trial was 137. Attention is now focused on how difficulty will be calibrated across sections in the actual exam.
In the elective sciences, the shift away from natural science subjects has emerged as another variable. In the September trial exam, 51,461 students chose only natural science electives, down 43.8% from a year earlier. The combined number of students in the top grade band across the eight natural science subjects also fell 42.0% to 8,311.
Separately, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education will allow out-of-school teenagers to sit the exam on a trial basis for the first time in the country. A total of 130 out-of-school teenagers will take the test at the office's support center for out-of-school youth, Chinguirang, and at five high schools in Seoul.