In 2008, the Ministry of Education of South
Korea planned to develop a domestic, standardized language
test called the National English Ability Test (NEAT)
as part of sweeping reforms designed to democratize and
improve the Korean education system. On many levels,
NEAT was an innovative initiative. From a financial perspective,
NEAT was designed to curb private spending on
English education and to divert money from international
standardized English tests. Educationally, NEAT was
groundbreaking in that it introduced speaking and writing
into English assessment and was meant to replace the
English section on the College Scholastic Ability Test of
Korea. In addition, NEAT was a two-track English test for
high school students intended to meet the differing needs of
students and colleges. After about five years, including a
trialing period and a new presidential administration, plans
for implementing NEAT were abandoned officially in
2013. The present paper examines the educational,
sociopolitical, and economic factors that led to the rise and
demise of NEAT from a critical language testing perspective.
Following the tenets of critical language testing,
this paper addresses the responsibility of the language
testers to create an assessment that fairly measures testtakers’
language proficiency. A review and an inductive
interpretation of policy documents and recent NEAT
research demonstrate the discrepancies among the original
intentions of NEAT, the unintended outcomes, and overlooked
issues of practicality. Findings also reveal that the
two tracks of NEAT negatively branded both students and
universities, deepening instead of alleviating the English
divide.

EB00000002180K

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• An Analysis of the Failure(s) of South Korea’s National English Ability Test