The 2026 university entrance examination will be held on Nov. 13 (Thursday). The exam will omit 'killer questions' (extremely difficult questions) for the third consecutive year, following government policy. The connection rate between EBS materials and the exam will also remain at around 50%.
The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation and the Ministry of Education announced the basic plan for the 2026 college entrance exam at the Government Sejong Hall on the 25th.
The policy to exclude killer questions will also be maintained in this year's exam. Over the past two years, the institute has reiterated the exclusion of killer questions when announcing the basic plan for the exam. This comes as discussions arose regarding the 2024 college entrance exam being labeled as the 'most difficult exam ever' due to the challenging nature of the Korean, math, and English sections.
Oh Seung-gul, the head of the institute, noted, 'We will exclude killer questions again this year and will operate a committee composed of teachers to monitor the exam questions.'
Additionally, this year's exam will continue the integrated system for liberal arts and science introduced since the 2022 academic year.
The Korean and math sections will be conducted as 'common subjects + elective subjects.' In the Korean section, students must choose one from 'speech and writing' or 'language and media' in addition to the common subjects of reading and literature. Math will have math I and math II as common subjects, and students can choose one subject from 'probability and statistics,' 'calculus,' or 'geometry.' For social and science inquiry, students can select up to two subjects from 17 offered. The Korean history section remains mandatory this year. The English, Korean history, and second foreign language/classical Chinese sections will be administered on a criterion-referenced basis.
The connection rate with EBS will remain at 50%. The government has been linking EBS materials to the exam as part of measures to reduce private education since 2012. Initially, 70% of the exam questions were based on EBS, but due to issues such as EBS materials replacing textbooks, the percentage was lowered to 50% starting from the 2022 academic year.
The practice exams preceding the college entrance exam will be conducted two times on June 3 and September 3.
Following the announcement of the basic plan for the exam, the institute will announce detailed implementation plans on July 7. The application process will be conducted from August 21 to September 5. After the exam on November 3, the application for question and answer challenges will be accepted from November 13 to 17. The final answers to the college entrance exam will be confirmed on November 25.
The score notification date for the college entrance exam is December 5. The score report will include the subjects and the names of the examined areas. For each area and subject, standard scores, percentiles, and grades will be listed, but only grades based on criterion-referenced assessments will be provided for the English area, Korean history area, and second foreign language/classical Chinese area. Additionally, if a student does not take the Korean history section, the entire exam will be deemed invalid, and no score report will be issued.