November 21, 2025
SEOUL – This year’s English section on the College Scholastic Ability Test, or Suneung, was more difficult than last year, according to teachers and education experts.
“(The English section) was a bit more difficult than last year’s Suneung and similar to the September mock exam,” said Kim Ye-ryeong, a teacher at Daewon Foreign Language High School, who appeared on the state-run Educational Broadcasting System on Thursday after Suneung ended.
Kim noted that while this year’s exam contained no so-called “killer questions” — extremely complex items that only top scorers can solve — it nonetheless achieved strong score differentiation.
EBS concluded that the English section was comparable in difficulty to the September mock exam. In that exam, 4.5 percent of students scored 90 or higher out of 100, earning the top grade (Level 1). By comparison, a typical “appropriate” difficulty level sees around 7 percent of students reaching this score.
Below are some of the questions that test-takers, private education experts, and EBS identified as the most challenging in this year’s English section.
Question 34, which some test-takers called the most difficult item, asks students to interpret a passage on Immanuel Kant’s justification for the rule of law and choose the most appropriate option to fill in the blank. The original question appears below:
34. Kant was a strong defender of the rule of law as the ultimate guarantee, not only of security and peace, but also of freedom. He believed that human societies were moving towards more rational forms regulated by effective and binding legal frameworks because only such frameworks enabled people to live in harmony, to prosper and to co-operate. However, his belief in inevitable progress was not based on an optimistic or high-minded view of human nature. On the contrary, it comes close to Hobbes’s outlook: man’s violent and conflict-prone nature makes it necessary to establish and maintain an effective legal framework in order to secure peace. We cannot count on people’s benevolence or goodwill, but even ‘a nation of devils’ can live in harmony in a legal system that binds every citizen equally. Ideally, the law is the embodiment of those political principles that all rational beings would freely choose. If such laws forbid them to do something that they would not rationally choose to do anyway, then the law cannot be _________. (3 points)
① regarded as reasonably confining human liberty
② viewed as a strong defender of the justice system
③ understood as a restraint on their freedom
④ enforced effectively to suppress their evil nature
⑤ accepted within the assumption of ideal legal framework
The correct answer is choice ③.
EBS said many students likely struggled because the phrase “cannot be” required them to select an option that directly contradicts the passage’s general thrust.
Question 39 deals with a more approachable topic — video games — yet it proved to be one of the most daunting. It asks students to determine where a given sentence should be inserted in a paragraph. The original question appears below:
39. The difference is that the action in the game world can only be explored through the virtual bodily space of the avatar.
A video game has its own model of reality, internal to itself and separate from the player’s external reality, the player’s bodily space and the avatar’s bodily space. ( ① ) The avatar’s bodily space, the potential actions of the avatar in the game world, is the only way in which the reality of the external reality of the game world can be perceived. ( ② ) As in the real world, perception requires action. ( ③ ) Players extend their perceptual field into the game, encompassing the available actions of the avatar. ( ④ ) The feedback loop of perception and action that enables you to navigate the world around you is now one step removed: instead of perceiving primarily through interaction of your own body with the external world, you’re perceiving the game world through interaction of the avatar. ( ⑤ ) The entire perceptual system has been extended into the game world. (3 points)”
The correct answer is ③.
“Although video games are relatively familiar to students, this question set students apart because they had to understand the meaning of key expressions in context, and with precision, in order to follow the passage’s flow,” EBS said.