Korean English newspaper

Q) You don't need to read it all but just if possible skim it a little to see if things wrote are natural overall. I ask this cause the way I evaluate someone's English will be clearly different from native speakers in many areas.

Moon Sang-won, 22, is one of 104 students who completely aced the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) last year, earning perfect scores in all three sections, math, Korean and English.

Like most students, Moon studied hard and his own and also with tutors.

Unlike many students, he also attended a live-in hagwon, or cram school.

“The most helpful thing,” said Moon, “were the many teachers who knew me better than I know myself.”

The CSAT was administered to over 660,000 college hopefuls for 2013 on Nov. 8, with results released a month later.

The number of students who got perfect scores was up four-fold from last year. The administrators of the exam, the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, admitted that the test was easier than the year before, particularly the English section.

Students who don’t do well can retake the exam over and over again. Moon’s perfect score came on his third time taking the exam. He was the first perfect-scorer to have studied at a live-in hagwon, which hire top lecturers and have a ratio of two to five teachers per student compared to regular hagwons, in which one lecturer teaches hundreds of students. Live-in hagwons cost on average 1.95 million won ($1,800) per month, including room and board.

Like most students, Moon felt pressure to do well on the exams to get into a top college. His goal was attending Seoul National University. Before he signed up for a year at the live-in Haklimwon in Anseong, Gyeonggi, he tried many methods to raise his scores such as listening to Internet lectures and solving problems on his own. But his scores didn’t improve.

“It is true that you know yourself the best, but it is not easy to evaluate yourself,” he said. “The teachers here skillfully evaluated me and guided me. They pointed out my problems and helped me overcome them.

“In the case of regular hagwon, I feel like there are so many temptations to avoid on the way to classes or after them. But living in a dormitory hagwon provides a space in which I was able to get away from temptations and just focus on my studies,” Moon said. “We can be in control of our own minds ourselves but it’s a fact that it’s difficult to control external influences.”

Now, Moon’s top subject is English. His studying method was to memorize 30 words a day for 11 months. He said the key to mastering the subject was “repetition.”

But he emphasizes “there is no special method” to acing the CSAT. “You will waste a whole year trying to find a shortcut to studying,” he said.

Reviewing, prepping and taking notes on problems you make mistakes on, he said, are the three basic foundations to preparing for the CSAT. “Without that, it is like building a castle on sand.”

He also gives advice to students to stay calm during the exam and not panic, and advises against take tranquilizers, which can have adverse side effects. “Do not lose your focus and try your hardest till the end,” he said. Moon starts classes at SNU in March.