An analysis on the 5th said that even though English on the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) changed to absolute grading, the rate of participation in private education and the average monthly cost of private education increased.
According to the education community that day, research professor Gwak Naram of Soongsil University and others published a paper titled "An analysis of the impact of introducing absolute grading for CSAT English on the demand for private education" in the journal Sociology of Education Research of the Korean Society for the Sociology of Education.
The research team analyzed private education spending after 2015, when the government switched CSAT English to absolute grading, based on the private education cost surveys by the Ministry of Education and Statistics Korea. To exclude the impact of inflation, they converted private education costs into real amounts using the Consumer Price Index (CPI), then analyzed them using pre- and post-policy implementation comparisons and comparison groups such as Korean and math.
As a result, real private education costs for English decreased in 2015 and 2016. But they began to increase in 2017. The research team said, "After the policy was implemented, a phenomenon appeared in which the upward trend in private education costs for other subjects failed to keep up with the rise in English."
A similar pattern appeared in nominal private education costs. Among general high school students, the average monthly private education cost for English rose from 90,000 won in 2016 to 91,000 won in 2017. After that, it climbed to 102,000 won in 2018, with the pace of increase also growing. The average monthly private education cost for English kept rising, reaching 157,000 won in 2024. The share of general high school students receiving private English education increased from 35.4% in 2016 to 48.8% in 2024.
The research team said, "Students who had been receiving grade 1 (top 4%) under the previous relative grading likely expanded private education as a risk-averse investment to maintain their current performance stably." They added, "Students close to grade 1 (top 4%–11%) may have expanded private education by reinforcing expectations that they could clear the threshold for grade 1, which had been difficult to surpass under relative grading."