18 hours ago
Boys outscore girls in math, while girls lead in English on Suneung: data
Male students outscored their female peers in math on the national college entrance exam, or Suneung, in 2024, a trend that has continued for four consecutive years, data shows.
In contrast, female students continued to lead in English, while performance in Korean remained nearly identical across genders.
According to the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation on Sunday, which oversees the annual College Scholastic Ability Test, male students had a higher average score of 102.7 in math, compared to 97.1 points for female students. The average standard score in Korean was higher among female students, at 100.8 points, compared to 99.1 points for male students. These figures are not raw scores, but are weighted and adjusted to reflect performance relative to other test takers.
The institute's analysis also showed that a higher percentage of male students ranked in the top two performance levels in math. Specifically, 5.9 percent of male students were in Level 1 and 9.4 percent in Level 2, compared to just 2.2 percent and 5.3 percent of female students, respectively.
In Korea's college entrance exam, students are ranked in nine levels based on their relative performance, with Level 1 representing the top 4 percent of test takers and Level 2 roughly covering the top 11 percent.
In English, a higher percentage of female students placed in the top two levels. Among female test takers, 6.3 percent scored in Level 1 and 16.6 percent in Level 2, slightly higher than the 6.1 percent and 16.1 percent recorded for male students.
In Korean, the proportion of top-performing students was nearly the same between male and female students. In Level 1, 4.3 percent of male students and 4.4 percent of female students were represented — a difference of just 0.1 percentage point. The gap was equally narrow in Level 2, with 7.1 percent for male students and 7 percent for female students.
A total of 463,486 students took the College Scholastic Ability Test in 2024, up 4.18 percent from 2023. Of them, 238,346 were male and 225,140 were female.
