Exchange-traded fund (ETF) jargon and investment structures appeared on a 12th-grade Korean mock exam, drawing attention among test-takers.
According to the education sector on the 9th, a passage in the reading section of the 12th-grade Korean exam for the nationwide academic assessment held in Jul. 2026 covered ETF management methods and revenue structures. The passage included terms such as net asset value (NAV) and premium/discount rate that are mainly seen in securities firm reports or investment books.
Question 15 was the one test-takers found particularly difficult. The item presented a chart of the base index's daily movements and asked students to choose explanations that matched the characteristics of ETF products such as passive, active, leveraged, and covered call.
It went beyond simply locating concepts in the passage and required judging by applying each product's management method and revenue structure to real investment situations. The item recorded a wrong-answer rate of 73.9% and was cited as the hardest question on this test.
In addition, Question 16, which required inferring the liquidity provider (LP)'s creation and redemption timing and the arbitrage process based on an intraday ETF price and real-time indicative net asset value (iNAV) graph, also posted a wrong-answer rate of 54.8%.
After the exam, test-takers reacted with dismay. Online, some said, "I don't know if I took a Korean test or the Certified Investment Manager exam," and "Is this an era when you can't even solve Korean questions if you don't trade stocks?"