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Latest from Across Cultures
Key Priorities for Restoring Trust in the CSAT English Assessment: A Focus on Validity, Fairness, and Ethics
Article · Open Access · Received: 27 July 2026 / Received in Revised Form: 29 July 2026 / Accepted: 1 August 2026 · Publication date: 3 August 2026 · DOI: 10.23404/apalcevoices.2026.1.7
Young Ok Jong
Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of Foreign Language Education, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, 107 Imun-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 02450, South Korea.
Copyright 2026 APALCE Voices This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Summary
The paper argues that restoring trust in the CSAT English assessment requires an integrated commitment to validity, fairness, and ethics. It calls for closer curriculum alignment, more authentic assessment of reading comprehension, objective passage selection and difficulty control, and stronger positive washback on teaching and learning. The 2023 item-overlap case illustrates weaknesses in review, verification, and appeal procedures. The paper also highlights risks arising from commercial use of test-development experience, limited expert pools, and AI-generated test items. It recommends data-driven validation, clearer criterion-referenced standards, conflict-of-interest safeguards, broader specialist development, and stronger ethical oversight.
Keywords
CSAT English assessment; assessment validity; procedural fairness; test ethics; data-driven validation
Discussion of the English section of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) should not be confined to whether the examination is too difficult or too easy. A more fundamental question is whether it assesses students’ English proficiency validly within the boundaries of the high school curriculum, exerts a constructive influence on classroom teaching and student learning, and is administered in a manner that sustains public confidence in a national-level examination. Restoring trust in the CSAT English assessment ultimately requires the validity of the test, the fairness of its procedures, and the ethical conduct of those involved to be secured within a coherent system.
Research published over the past 19 years in the journal Secondary English Education has examined these issues from a range of perspectives. Studies have investigated whether the vocabulary, syntax, and readability of CSAT passages are appropriate for high school students and consistent with the curriculum. They have also considered whether high-difficulty item types, such as gap-filling inference, sentence insertion, and text-ordering questions, assess English reading proficiency or place excessive demands on test-taking strategies and logical reasoning. Other recurring concerns include the washback of the EBS linkage policy, which encouraged translation- and memorisation-based classroom practices; fluctuations in grade distributions and difficulty following the introduction of criterion-referenced grading; and the limited capacity of a test focused on reading and listening to reflect the communicative competencies emphasised in the curriculum.
These studies point in a relatively clear direction. The CSAT English section should move away from distinguishing students primarily according to their familiarity with particular item formats and instead assess their ability to understand English texts accurately and draw reasonable inferences. Put differently, the emphasis should shift from English for test taking to English for real-world use. Although differentiation is necessary in a university entrance examination, it should not be achieved through abstruse passages beyond the curriculum or questions designed primarily as traps. Given the substantial influence of the CSAT on schools, promoting positive washback that guides student learning and classroom teaching in a desirable direction should also be regarded as an important responsibility of the assessment.
More objective criteria are required for passage selection and difficulty control. The topics, vocabulary, sentence structures, and cognitive demands of CSAT English passages should be aligned with the high school curriculum. Passages should not privilege particular political, religious, gendered, or regional perspectives, and materials requiring specialised background knowledge available only to certain students should be treated with caution. Each passage should also constitute a coherent and complete text with a clear central idea and logical progression, rather than a collection of disconnected sentences. While the experience and professional judgement of test developers remain important, difficulty should be predicted and managed more objectively through evidence such as lexical frequency, syntactic complexity, readability indices, and corpus analysis.
The substantial overlap between Question 23 of the 2023 CSAT English section and a passage used in a privately produced mock examination prompted renewed scrutiny of the safeguards within the test development system. When a passage of approximately 130–150 words is more than 90 per cent identical, it is difficult to attribute the similarity solely to coincidence. At the same time, it would be equally premature to conclude immediately that deliberate collusion occurred. On the basis of publicly released investigation findings, it is necessary to examine whether late-stage item replacement, severe time pressure, the omission of particular commercial materials from the verification process, and shortcomings in the handling of post-examination objections operated in combination. The central issue should not be reduced to the mistake of one individual. Rather, it concerns whether the multiple safeguards covering item development, review, final approval, and post-examination adjudication functioned as intended.
The relationship between experience in CSAT item development and the private education market also warrants careful reflection. Participation in national test development or review ordinarily signifies that an individual’s assessment expertise has been recognised by the state. Yet when information asymmetry surrounding the test development process is combined with market demand for CSAT-like questions and a limited pool of qualified specialists, such experience may be commodified as a form of commercial premium. This concern may become more pronounced as generative AI enables private education providers to produce large numbers of standardised CSAT-style questions. The greater the reliance on repeatable formats such as gap-filling inference and text-ordering items, the greater the risk that test performance will reflect intensive training in question types rather than genuine English proficiency.
Several institutional reforms therefore need to proceed in parallel. First, reliance on formulaic high-difficulty items should be reduced, and the ability to understand and infer meaning from texts should be assessed more directly. Second, the level of achievement represented by each grade under the criterion-referenced system should be clearly defined and applied consistently from year to year. Third, data-driven validation using corpora, readability measures, and pilot-testing evidence should be strengthened, together with pre-examination screening for overlap with commercial materials and potential conflicts of interest. It is equally important to develop a broader pool of assessment specialists over the long term, strengthen post-participation ethical regulations and oversight, and ensure that objection and appeal procedures function substantively rather than merely formally.
Trust in the CSAT English assessment does not arise from making questions difficult. It depends on how validly and fairly students’ English proficiency is assessed in relation to the curriculum, how responsibly the entire development and verification process is managed, and how constructively the resulting assessment influences school education. The task now is not simply to preserve or defend existing practices, but to move carefully towards a sustainable assessment system in which validity, fairness, and ethics are secured together.
References
Jung, C. K., Kim, T., Lee, S., & Kim, J. (2025). An analysis of question type classification in the 2025 CSAT English test: Focusing on the listening section. Studies in Foreign Language Education, 39(4), 233-250.
Kim, J., Nam, I., & Jung, C. K. (2026). Question type classification in the 2026 CSAT English section: A focus on reading comprehension. Studies in Foreign Language Education, 40(2), 85-103.
Kim, J., Lee, S., & Jung, C. K. (2026). Validating linguistic difficulty in the language forms for communication of the Republic of Korea’s 2022 National English Curriculum. The Journal of Asia TEFL, 23(1), 34-51.
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