The term ‘killer question’ began to appear frequently around 2010, during the Lee Myung-bak administration. A current high school teacher said, “There were times when the CSAT questions were difficult and easy before, but fundamental problems were accumulating,” adding, “While the CSAT was first implemented in 1994 and continued for nearly 15 years, the curriculum and what students learned did not change significantly. “From the test taker’s perspective, the space to come up with new questions continues to decrease,” he said. As past exam questions piled up, students began to ‘adapt’ to the CSAT, and in the meantime, education authorities kept reducing the scope of learning that high school students were required to learn, saying they wanted to reduce the academic burden.

However, the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) is still the most objective means of college entrance evaluation in Korea. In particular, I had to play the role of ‘objectively’ lining up the top students. For this reason, the test committee members looked for ‘more difficult and more complex’ problems and used various papers, classical philosophy, specialized knowledge books in the field of economics and finance, and even mathematical theories from university courses for the CSAT. Analysis suggests that what was born as a result was a ‘killer question.’

Killer questions were mainly asked in the Korean and math areas of the CSAT or mock tests. In the Korean language class of 2019, there was a problem that could be solved only if you had knowledge of universal gravitation. In the 2020 Korean language, technical terms such as capital adequacy ratio ( BIS ), risk-weighted assets, and Basel Convention appeared in the text. In the 2022 school year, a question asked about Hegel’s dialectic. In mathematics, complex differential problems were asked in the 2018 school year, and the correct answer rate was around 2%.

Because the questions were difficult and presented in a twisted manner, there were also concerns about errors in the exam. During the 2021 College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), controversy arose over errors in life science questions, and 92 test takers at the time filed a lawsuit against the Evaluation Institute. Here, even a professor from a prestigious American university appeared. The students who filed the lawsuit sent an e-mail to biology professors at American universities asking if this problem was asked incorrectly, and Jonathan Pritchard, a world authority in the field of genetics and a professor at Stanford University, tweeted, “There is a mathematical contradiction in the problem.” revealed. In the end, Kang Dae-jung, the head of the evaluation center at the time, resigned and all questions were given as correct answers.

In the 2002 school year, which was considered a representative ‘impossible college entrance exam’ (difficult college entrance exam), the college entrance exam became so much more difficult than the previous year that President Kim Dae-jung said at a cabinet meeting, “I am very sorry when I think of the parents and students who were shocked after believing in the government’s promise that the exam would be easy. He even apologized, saying, “I hate it.”

● ‘I was shocked’ by the president’s words… Leading to ‘cartel’ investigation
Despite these problems, it is pointed out that the ‘killer question’ incident, which began in June, occurred suddenly and without preparation. On June 15, just 155 days before the College Scholastic Ability Test, President Yoon said, “Put questions in such a way that you can solve them if you have the ability to discriminate but follow school classes diligently, and exclude from the questions questions that were not covered in school classes,” said Lee Joo-ho, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education. instructed the minister. On the same day, the President’s Office announced that it would amend its statement to say, “If questions are asked that are not covered in the public education curriculum, doesn’t that mean we should rely on private education?”

As concerns arose over the ‘water test’ (too easy CSAT), the President’s Office said on the 16th, “We are not talking about an easy CSAT or a difficult CSAT. “Fair discrimination is the essence of all tests,” he said, re-submitting material correcting the president’s remarks. On the afternoon of the same day, Vice Minister of Education Jang Sang-yoon said, “It was an order for a fair CSAT.” It has subtly changed from ‘school classes’ to ‘public education’, to ‘fair discrimination’, and then to ‘fair CSAT’.

The situation spread to personnel affairs. On June 16, Lee Yun-hong, a talent policy planning officer at the Ministry of Education who is in charge of entrance exams, was placed on standby. On the 19th of the same month, Lee Gyu-min, director of the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, resigned midway through his term. It was the first time that the director of the Ministry of Education and the head of the evaluation center had to step down because of a mock evaluation rather than a college entrance exam. Next was the academy district. This was the aftermath of President Yoon targeting education authorities and private education companies, asking, “Are you talking about a cartel?” Major academies and famous ‘Ilta instructors’ in the Gangnam-gu area of ​​Seoul have begun to undergo tax investigations. A private education official said, “Academies are almost like a public security situation. “Everyone is holding their breath,” he said. “There is also pressure secretly not to release analysis data related to the CSAT or mock evaluations.”

Some also criticize the government for “hunting down the culprit before finding the cause of the problem.” It is pointed out that if the killer question is the problem, we should have first considered why this type of question appeared in the CSAT. One high school teacher said, “The killer question is the result of a combination of factors such as a narrowing of the scope of study, a long-term exhaustion of CSAT questions, soaring cutoff points and concentration of students in some popular departments such as medical school, and the lack of objective evaluation indicators other than the CSAT.” He pointed out, “The government should have carefully considered these points first, but in reality, they looked at people first.”

● Korea’s education fever is overheating… The legendary ‘radish juice wave’

It is cited as the background to Korea’s excessive enthusiasm for education. This is because the situation in which the President joins in and the National Tax Service is mobilized in the controversy over ‘what questions to include and exclude from college entrance exams’ cannot be found overseas. It shows that Korea is extremely sensitive to education issues.

An incident that is often mentioned as a symbolic example of Korea’s overheated education scene was the 1964 (1965 school year) Gyeonggi Entrance Exam Question Error incident. At the time, admission to Gyeonggi Middle School was considered a shortcut from Gyeonggi High School to Seoul National University, and talented students from all over the country flocked to it. In the entrance exam’s nature subject number 18, there was a question asking ‘substances that can be used instead of malt when making taffy’. The correct answer was ‘Diastase’, but the problem was that the other answer was ‘radish juice’. Some students chose radish juice as the correct answer but got it wrong. Parents who had experience making malt from radish juice when they were young started a protest rally and filed a lawsuit, saying, “Radish juice is also the answer.”

Kim Won-gyu, who was the superintendent of education in Seoul at the time, said, “If I can make taffy with radish juice, I will try to rescue students who used radish juice as an answer.” Some parents actually made malt with radish juice in a pot and brought it to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education to the city council members. He protested and said, “Fuck you.” Eventually, after half a year, some of the students who chose ‘radish juice’ as the correct answer were transferred to Gyeonggi Middle School. At the time, Han Sang-bong, Vice Minister of Culture, Sports and Education, and the city superintendent of education took responsibility and resigned. This became the starting point for the abolition of middle school entrance exams in 1969.

● Education sector: “Need to think about competitive structure”
The problem lies ahead. This is because the September mock evaluation, which excluded killer questions, revealed some uneasiness in terms of ‘discrimination ability’. The evaluation that the math subject was ‘easy’ came out. Among the high school students who completed the exam on the 6th, many of the top ranked students responded, “If this is going to happen, I don’t know why I studied math.”

If the College Scholastic Ability Test has lost its ability to differentiate, other data that can be used by universities to differentiate, or ‘line up’, students who applied on time are obvious. The only way is to increase the weight on math or specific subjects메이저사이트, or to ask more difficult problems and questions than in essays or interviews.

In the education world, the controversy over the killer question continues to lead to criticism that more fundamental problems need to be resolved. One high school teacher pointed out, “Unless the current entrance examination structure of relative evaluation and competition is changed, controversies similar to the killer question will arise in some way.” In fact, in Korea, the Ministry of Education forces each university to select a certain percentage of new students on a regular basis (based on CSAT scores). Major universities in the metropolitan area select approximately 40% of their students on a regular basis.

Due to the structure of the regular examination, which selects based on 100% of the CSAT score, if you advance to the top universities such as major medical schools, pharmacy schools, veterinary schools, oriental medicine schools, dental schools, Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University, the difference in one question is bound to determine whether you are successful or not. It is pointed out that universities want the CSAT to fulfill this function, and that the killer questions designed by the test committee members for this purpose are.

Recently, attempts are being made to change this system at some universities. When recruiting new students, there is no division between departments and departments, and only ‘first year’ students are selected, or only those in the humanities or natural sciences fields are selected. If you select students like this, there is no need to rank them from 1st to 100th. Once selected, students who show excellent grades during the first year will be able to advance to good departments in the second or third year. A professor at a private university said, “The so-called prestigious universities have focused only on selecting excellent students from the beginning without making efforts to teach students well. “As a result, the quality of university education has deteriorated,” he said. “Universities can only become competitive if they change to select and create excellent talent rather than selecting only good students.”