Jung Da-hyun is a reporter at The Korea Times, covering social issues in Korea, including foreign residents, education, environment and politics. Driven by a deep interest in people’s stories, she focuses on investigative and feature reporting through direct interviews and field coverage. She received the Amnesty International Korea Media Award for her “Deepfake Crisis at Schools” series. Reach her at dahyun08@koreatimes.co.kr. Always open to hearing your stories.
Think your English is good? Try solving Korea’s 'insane' college entrance test!
The first page of the English test of the 2026 CSAT
By Jung Da-hyun
Editor’s note
The questions and answers links have been updated to better reflect which test the extracted questions and answers come from. The previous links provided both the odd number and even number tests, while the extracted questions are from the odd number test only.
The English section of Korea’s College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) is infamous for its difficulty — so much so that many native English speakers, including well-educated adults, have described it as “insane” after reviewing some of the passages and questions faced by students.
This year’s CSAT, conducted Thursday, was determined to be of moderate difficulty.
Here are questions from the actual 2026 CSAT English test. Test your English skills with them — and try to imagine what it’s like to be a Korean high school student preparing for this exam.
No cheating!
(You can download the complete set of questions and answers here.)
Test takers were given 45 questions to be answered in 70 minutes.
Q24. Choose the best title for the following passage.
Q32. Choose the phrase that best completes the sentence.
Q34. Choose the phrase that best completes the sentence.
Q37. Choose the most appropriate order of the sentences that would follow the given passage.
Q39. Choose the most appropriate place for the given sentence in the flow of the passage.