Students prepare for the College Scholastic Ability Test at Hyowon High School in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, Nov. 13, 2025. Newsis

Korea’s notoriously difficult College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) English section is now heading for an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven overhaul, with officials saying that the reform begins with a simple diagnosis: The English used on the university entrance test is not the kind of English people actually use.

The Ministry of Education announced earlier this week that it will build an AI-based system to generate English passages, with the goal of using them in mock exams for the 2028 academic year. Officials will also work to apply the technology to review CSAT questions.

A senior ministry official who oversees the project acknowledged that recent CSATs included English passages using language that is “not actually used in real life.”

“The reason is that we have been relying on overseas source texts, and those sources tend to be academic papers or convoluted scholarly books, which have drawn criticism (for being impractical),” the official told The Korea Times.

He said the problem of CSAT English being impractical and unnatural is part of what the ministry is trying to fix through the ongoing work for the new AI system.

Once the system is built, AI is expected to generate and revise passages “in interaction with” human experts, according to the official.

The AI initiative comes as a reminder of what CSAT English is officially for. According to the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, which designs and administers the CSAT and other national-level educational assessments, the purpose of the 2025 CSAT English was to assess how well students have met the high school English curriculum standards, as well as their “practical English skills for everyday life” and the English proficiency needed for college study.

That means, in principle, the exam should sit somewhere between everyday communication and academic reading. But critics say recent CSATs have substantially missed that target by heavily favoring complicated sentences and pseudo‑academic structures that few encounter outside of test papers.

For some experts, the shift to AI is an overdue chance to bring the exam closer to its stated purpose.

Source: Korea Times News