A study of the English absolute grading system in the CSAT through discourse and interviews

This study aims to critically examine the impact and significance of the CSAT English absolute grading system in English education by analyzing media and academic discourse on the system and comparing the perceptions of teachers and students. To this end, media discourse and academic discourse from 2017 to 2025 were collected and analyzed using Textom through word weighting, N-gram, and Concor analyses, and in-depth interviews were conducted with English teachers, current high school students, and graduates. The findings indicate that the absolute grading system for English in the College Scholastic Ability Test has failed to adequately address the structural problems in English education, despite changes in the evaluation method. Therefore, future English education policy should go beyond simply changing the evaluation method and take into account the linkage between the CSAT and school English education, improvements to the evaluation system that reflect actual English proficiency and communicative competence, and a policy decision-making structure that incorporates feedback from the educational field. Furthermore, the findings provide a basis for reconsidering the expansion of absolute grading to all subjects, particularly in relation to the alignment among the assessment system, the school curriculum, and the college admissions system.