The English section in the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) for 2015 has drawn attention as many changes were made and questions were easier to answer than ever before.
But the CSAT has touched off a new controversy over some potentially erroneous questions on this year's test, damaging the credibility of the test administrator. Last year's error in the world geography section was confirmed by the Seoul High Court last month.
One question in the English section presented a graph on the changing patterns of American teenagers' social media use and asked test-takers to choose the one incorrect answer from the five listed.
However, there were two incorrect answers because the test mistakenly referred to an increase from 2 percent to 20 percent as 18 "percent" rather than 18 "percentage points." An 18-percent increase from 2 percent would add up to 2.36 percent, not 20 percent.
As for the major changes, the total number of questions and test time stayed the same. However, the most outstanding change took place in English listening comprehension, where the number of questions was reduced from 22 to 17.
However, the number of questions in reading comprehension doubled from eight to 16, while the grammar and vocabulary part remained unchanged with three questions.
The number of questions in the "fill in the blank" part was reduced from seven to four.
When the English test was over at 2:20 p.m. on Thursday, the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE) which administers the CSAT said that 76 percent of the questions were connected to practice questions previously aired by the Education Broadcasting System (EBS).
This means that the KICE has kept its promise to lower the difficulty level of the English test.
Now the question is how to evaluate students' English ability as many test-takers will get high scores, making it hard to distinguish high-performing students from low-performing ones.
Still there would be some factors that determine who should be in the top rank or who should be in the lower ranks.
According to a poll conducted right after the exam, seven out of 10 test-takers said the level of difficulty was "fair," which means the difficulty level of the English section was similar to the mock exam taken in September and much easier than last year's CSAT.
Analysts estimate that as much as 4 percent of about 640,000 test-takers will get a perfect score in the English section, hitting the highest rate since the CSAT was introduced in 1993 for the 1994 academic year. This means that the English test is the easiest since then.
More than a majority of respondents said the grammar section was "fairly easy." However, many respondents said in "fill in the blank" section, question numbers 32 and 42 were quite confusing, compared with other questions.
Especially for question number 42, applicants said the words on the choices left them quite confused. As you can see, numbers 32 and 42 which are worth three points each will be key to the border line between the first-rank group and the second-rank group under the relative evaluation system that divides the test-takers into nine grade groups.
Experts expect that 98 points against the full 100 points is the bottom line for students to rank in the best performing group which accounts for the top 4 percent of test-takers.
The score is higher than 93 points in the 2014 CSAT. However, it is lower than the mock exam in June (100 points) and another mock exam in September (98 points).
Since the English section was the easiest exam in the history of the CSAT, the Korean section and other sections such as history, sociology and geography will be the deciding factor for evaluating the overall performance of test-takers.
But what's irritating is that the alleged question error in the English section could raise the cut-off score for the top grade students. If this proves to be the case, it may make it harder to accurately evaluate the performance of the test takers.
Lim Seong-ho is CEO of Haneul Education. His email address is sungho@edusky.co.kr.