South Korea’s crucial college entrance exam is now engulfed in another dispute over the accuracy of its questions, after both students and experts criticized this year’s exam for being “too easy.”

As of Monday, the homepage of the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation had been barraged with over 1,000 complaints about test questions. The institute is in charge of making questions for the annual College Scholastic Aptitude Test, known here as the Suneung.

The majority of the complaints involved questions from the biology test and from the English test. The biology question had students select all the right descriptions of the production of an enzyme that breaks down lactose into glucose in wild-type Escherichia coli.

Some researchers claimed that only one of the two descriptions presented to students were 100 percent correct. Other experts, however, alleged that it was merely a trick question and could not be regarded as flawed.

The English question, on the other hand, came under fire for inaccurate phrasing in one of its supposedly correct sentences: It described the difference between 2 percent and 20 percent as “18 percent,” instead of “18 percentage points.” 

The dispute over the accuracy of the Suneung questions comes just a month after an appeals court ruled that a question from last year’s Suneung was flawed. In late October, the Education Ministry said it would accept the court ruling and vowed to work on measures to ensure that over 10,000 students affected by the flawed question would not be penalized in their college admission.

It remains unclear whether the challenges will be recognized by the authorities.

Education experts like Lee Bohm, a former education policy adviser for the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, said it was unlikely that the court would recognize the flaws of the English question as it had a single “optimal” answer that was 100 percent correct.

Final answers for the Suneung will be released next Monday, by which time both the KICE and the Education Ministry will have decided where they stand on the issue. The ministry will come up with a response ― which will include possibly awarding credit for multiple answers ― before official Suneung scores are announced on Dec. 3, a ministry official said.

Since 2000, Suneung questions have been challenged and proven to be wrong on four occasions. Some officials from the Education Ministry are saying that the reoccurring flaws stem from a lack of supervision. The ministry provides the budget for the KICE, but has no authority to monitor its activities since the organization is affiliated with the Prime Minister’s Office.

By Yoon Min-sik (minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)