The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation opened registration Sept 22 for the fall College Scholastic Ability Test mock exam and said score reports will be delivered only through its authenticated student portal—no paper slips mailed to schools—after pilot districts reported lost mailouts and privacy leaks when physical envelopes sat in homeroom trays.
Calendar and who must sit
The mock runs Sept 27 at designated high schools and authorized hagwon halls, mirroring the November CSAT seating rules. Third-year students are auto-enrolled through school offices; retakers and gap-year students register individually with national ID verification. KICE kept the fee at 8,500 won, payable through the same billing module used for the spring mock.
What digital-only changes
Scores publish at 6 p.m. Oct 4 with item-level breakdowns for Korean, mathematics, English, and elective sections. Parents no longer sign paper receipts; guardians access results only if students grant portal delegation—a toggle KICE added after the spring pilot showed counselors were photocopying unofficial printouts. Schools can still download aggregate PDFs for homeroom briefings, but student-level PDFs carry watermark IDs to trace leaks.
Classroom impact Tuesday morning
Kyungsoo Moon’s desk question: which year and which school feel this first? Senior homerooms in Gyeonggi already scheduled Oct 5 counseling blocks assuming screens, not envelopes. Teachers in rural Gangwon warned that students without home broadband will use PC rooms; KICE said libraries must keep terminals open until 9 p.m. for one week, funded by a ministry grant, not out of library budgets.
Hagwon chains and APIs
Major hagwon franchises asked KICE to allow CSV exports for internal analytics; the agency refused bulk download, offering only on-screen charts to reduce resale of item banks. Some chains will manually key scores into adaptive drill platforms—Riiid and others market APIs, but this mock’s contract does not include automatic feeds, KICE confirmed.
Equity complaints
Disability advocates noted that screen-only reports help students using screen readers but hurt those who relied on teachers to explain paper histograms in class. KICE will host optional school webinars Oct 3 on reading percentile bands. Retakers worried digital archives make universities see every mock; the agency reiterated that official CSAT submissions remain separate and mocks are not reported to admissions offices unless students volunteer them.
What students should do now
Confirm portal passwords before Sept 27—locked accounts during the exam window cannot be reset until Oct 2. Bring the same ID used at registration; proctors will scan barcodes linking seats to portal accounts so scores do not attach to the wrong student. If the portal crashes on release night, KICE plans a text-message backup code, not a paper reissue—another reason schools are keeping IT staff on call Oct 4.
Education offices in Seoul and Busan said they will staff help desks Oct 4–5 for students who forget delegation settings, a paperwork step that used to be handled when teachers handed back paper reports in homeroom.
