The 2026 academic year College Scholastic Ability Test nationwide joint academic evaluation (mock examination) will be held on 4th. This mock examination, which is the first test of the year, is organized by the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, the organization responsible for the college entrance exam.
According to the institute, the June mock examination will be conducted simultaneously at 2,119 high schools and 511 designated private academies nationwide starting at 8:40 a.m. on that day.
A total of 503,572 test-takers are participating, of which 413,685 (82.2%) are third-year high school students, and 89,887 (17.8%) are graduates or GED candidates. The number of applicants for this mock examination is the highest since the 2011 academic year when relevant statistics were officially released. The number of current students increased by 28,250 compared to the previous year, as this year's third-year students are those born in 2007, a year of exceptional birth rates referred to as the 'golden pig year', and the number of graduates is also the highest since the 2011 academic year.
The June mock examination was originally scheduled to take place the day before, on the 3rd, but was delayed by a day due to the impact of the early presidential election.
The June mock examination will have the same nature, subject areas, and number of questions as the college entrance exam to be held on November 13. The Korean and mathematics sections will be structured as 'common + elective subjects'. Test-takers can choose one subject of their choice in each subject area. In the social and scientific inquiry sections, a maximum of two subjects can be selected from 17 subjects.
The June mock examination is a test that can gauge the direction and difficulty of the 2026 college entrance exam. The institute noted in March, when it announced the implementation plan for the June mock examination, that it would continue the trend of the college entrance exam without 'killer questions' (extremely difficult questions) and maintain an EBS linkage rate of about 50%. It seeks to exclude questions that favor students who have repeatedly trained in problem-solving techniques in private education and to allow those who have sincerely received education within the scope of public education and supplemented their study with EBS-related textbooks and lectures to solve the problems.
The June mock examination last year had no killer questions but was too difficult, while the September examination was too easy, causing significant confusion among test-takers. The difficulty of this June mock examination is expected to align with the level of the 2025 college entrance exam, which received a relatively 'appropriate' evaluation.
The exam will be conducted in the following order: ▲ 1st session Korean (8:40 a.m. - 10 a.m.) ▲ 2nd session Mathematics (10:30 a.m. - 12:10 p.m.) ▲ 3rd session English (1:10 p.m. - 2:20 p.m.) ▲ 4th session Korean history and social, scientific, and vocational inquiry (2:50 p.m. - 4:37 p.m.) ▲ 5th session Second foreign language and classical Chinese (5:05 p.m. - 5:45 p.m.).
Requests for objections regarding questions and answers will be accepted until the 7th. After the review of objections, the final answers will be confirmed and announced at 5 p.m. on the 17th of this month, and the scores will be notified on July 1. The September mock examination, which is the second and last test of the year organized by the institute, will be held on September 3.