Simulated College Entrance Exam Questions Reflect EBS Lectures

The 2005 simulation college entrance exam provided by the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE) yesterday has been analyzed, and it appears the exam reflected material taught in Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) lectures in 73-83 percent of its questions.

The head of the institute, Chung Gang-jeong, said in a press conference yesterday that “the questions were designed to help students feel the relevance of EBS lectures to the exam. Students who learn principles from school lectures and practice their understanding through exam questions provided by EBS lectures will have more advantage.”

“Diagrams and illustrations were given, along with dialogues shortened or prolonged depending on the situation, while more real world foreign language problems as well as problems requiring understanding of basic concepts and principles were asked on this exam,” Chung said. “We will try to reflect EBS lectures even more in the real exam.”

An EBS spokesperson reported, “We found 50 questions out of 60 in language, 30 out of 40 in mathematics, and 30 out of 50 in foreign language similar to the practice questions in our lectures, and this seems to show that the KICE is trying to reflect EBS lectures in its exam as much as possible.”

Students preparing for the exam agreed that dialogues and question styles on the exam seemed to reflect EBS lecture materials, but they had different opinions on how accurately EBS’s practice questions pinpointed the questions in the exam.

Lim Jae-seok, 19, from Dankook University Experimental High School, said, “In the language area, a lot of dialogues were similar to EBS’s, and styles of problems were also similar in many cases. Still, we can find similar questions in other materials as well, so EBS lectures are not a big deal.”

The KICE will finish receiving complaints and objections on the exam questions and its answers by September 20, confirm the answers by October 1, and then notify students of their scores on October 9.

In-Chul Lee inchul@donga.com