More than 15% of students scored in the top tier in English on September's mock college entrance exam, a sharp shift from last year's national exam and June's mock test, both of which drew complaints about punishing English sections. It was the third-highest top-tier share in English across all June and September mock exams and national exams since absolute grading was introduced for the subject in the 2018 academic year. With English difficulty swinging widely from test to test and the number of science-subject test takers plunging, students face a more complicated calculus roughly a month and a half before the actual exam.
The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation released the scoring results of the September mock exam for the 2027 College Scholastic Ability Test on the 28th. A total of 396,118 students sat for the test held on the 2nd, including 298,250 current high school students and 97,868 graduates and holders of high school equivalency certificates.
In English, which is graded on an absolute scale, 61,457 students scored 90 or higher out of 100 to reach the top tier, or 15.54% of all English test takers. A total of 89,291 students, or 22.58%, landed in the second tier, and 92,836, or 23.48%, in the third.
The test was far easier than last year's national exam and June's mock test. In the 2026 national exam held last year, only 3.11% of students, or 15,154, reached the top tier in English, the lowest since absolute grading was adopted. June's mock test produced a share of just 4.13%, or 16,979 students. The top-tier share jumped more than 10 percentage points in barely three months, making it even harder for students to gauge how difficult the actual exam will be. The September test ranked third for top-tier share since absolute grading began, after the June mock exam for the 2026 academic year at 19.10% and the September mock exam for the 2023 academic year at 15.97%.
Between Korean and math, Korean proved relatively harder. The standard score cutoff for the top tier in Korean was 131, with 16,363 students, or 4.16%, making the cut. For math, the cutoff was 128, with 21,666 students, or 5.55%. The highest standard score also differed by seven points, at 144 for Korean and 137 for math.
In the elective subjects, the shift of science-track students toward social studies instead of science became more pronounced. Of the 390,120 students who took social studies or science subjects, 270,301 chose only social studies, up 13.3% from last September's mock exam, while those who chose only science fell 43.8% to 51,461. As a result, the number of students in the upper tiers in science dropped sharply. According to Jinhak Apply, the simple sum of top-tier students across the eight science subjects fell 42.0% to 8,311 this year from 14,324 last year, and the combined first- and second-tier total fell 33.7% to 21,662 from 32,656.
"With the gap in difficulty between English and Korean and math, on top of the shift toward social studies, predicting scores by subject and judging which combinations are advantageous has become even harder for this year's exam," said Lim Sung-ho, CEO of Jongro Academy. "Students need to prepare for the possibility that English will be harder than it was in the September mock exam."
