Chapter 17: The CSAT
Daniel had a problem that no amount of future knowledge could solve: he had to take the CSAT.
The College Scholastic Ability Test. Suneung. The single most important exam in a Korean student’s life—a nine-hour marathon of Korean, Mathematics, English, Korean History, and Social Studies that determined, with the brutal efficiency of a sorting hat, which university you’d attend and, by extension, what kind of life you’d lead.
In his first life, Daniel had scored in the 72nd percentile. Decent enough for a mid-tier university. Not good enough for anywhere that mattered. He’d spent the next twenty years overcompensating for that score with hustle and luck and eventually forty billion won in revenue.
This time, he was going to Seoul National University.
“You’re aiming for SNU?” Soyeon said, her pen freezing mid-stroke during one of their Thursday study sessions. “Since when?”
“Since always. I just hadn’t told anyone.”
“Daniel, SNU requires a top-two-percent CSAT score. In Korean, Math, and English combined. Your current mock exam scores are—” She flipped to a page in her notebook where she had, apparently, been tracking his grades. “Seventy-eighth percentile in Korean, eighty-fifth in Math, ninety-second in English.”
“My English will be fine.”
“Your English is suspicious, is what it is. But that’s not the point. Your Korean and Math need to come up by at least ten percentile points each. In seven months.”
“I know.”
“That’s not ‘I know, I have a plan.’ That’s ‘I know, and I’m mildly terrified.'”
“I have a plan.”
“What plan?”
“You.”
Soyeon’s pen tapped once. Twice. Three times. “Excuse me?”
“You’re the best student in the school. You know the CSAT inside and out. You have a study system that’s so efficient it should be patented. And you’ve been studying with me for four months, which means you already know exactly where my weaknesses are.”
“You want me to be your tutor.”
“I want you to be my drill sergeant.”
“I’m already your study partner. This is different.”
“How is it different?”
“Because if I’m your tutor, I’m responsible for your results. And I don’t accept responsibility for things I’m not confident I can deliver.” She set down her pen. “Daniel, be honest with me. Why SNU? You could go to a good university with your current scores. Korea University, Yonsei. Why does it have to be SNU?”
Because at SNU, in 2010, there are three people I need to meet. A programmer named Yoon Sarah who will become the best CTO in Asia. A marketing genius named Lee Marcus who can sell ice to polar bears. And a professor named Kim Jongwoo whose AI research will change the world. I need all three of them for what I’m building.
“Because SNU is the best,” Daniel said. “And I’m done settling for less than the best.”
Soyeon studied him. Her eyes had that laser-focus quality—the look she got when she was deciding whether something was true or merely plausible.
“Fine,” she said. “But we do this my way. My schedule, my methods, my rules. And if you miss a study session without a valid excuse—”
“Two hot chocolates?”
“Three. And you explain to Mrs. Park why your Korean Literature essay is late.”
“That seems excessive.”
“Excellence is excessive. That’s what makes it excellence.”
Soyeon’s CSAT preparation program was, without exaggeration, the most rigorous thing Daniel had encountered in either of his lives. And he’d survived corporate restructuring, SEC investigations, and the time Nexus Technologies’ servers crashed during a live product demo in front of six hundred investors.
The schedule was as follows:
Monday through Friday, 4 PM to 7 PM: focused study at the library. Subjects rotated daily—Korean Monday and Wednesday, Math Tuesday and Thursday, Social Studies Friday. English was excluded because, as Soyeon put it, “your English is already at a level that defies explanation, and I’ve decided to stop trying to explain it.”
Saturday mornings, 9 AM to 12 PM: practice exams. Full sections, timed, graded by Soyeon with the merciless precision of a machine. Daniel’s scores were tracked on a spreadsheet that Soyeon updated weekly with color-coded trend lines.
Sunday: rest. Or in Daniel’s case, tutoring his own students, managing his Gmarket business, and checking his portfolio.
“Your Korean Literature analysis is too modern,” Soyeon told him during their second week. They were dissecting a passage from Hwang Sok-yong’s The Old Garden, and Daniel’s interpretation had been, apparently, too sophisticated.
“Too modern? What does that mean?”
“It means you’re analyzing this like a literary critic, not like a high school student. The CSAT doesn’t want original insight. It wants you to identify the correct answer from four options. Your job isn’t to have a unique interpretation. Your job is to figure out what the test-makers consider the correct interpretation.”
“That’s depressing.”
“That’s the system. Fight it after you’ve beaten it.”
Daniel adjusted. It was harder than he’d expected—not the content, which he could handle, but the mindset. Twenty-five years in business had trained him to think independently, to challenge assumptions, to find the answer that nobody else saw. The CSAT required the opposite: find the answer that everyone was supposed to see. Conform. Reproduce. Be correct in the way that the system defined correct.
“You’re overthinking again,” Soyeon said after he missed a reading comprehension question for the third time. “The passage says ‘the protagonist felt a sense of loss.’ The answer is C: ‘The protagonist experiences melancholy.’ You circled A: ‘The protagonist confronts existential uncertainty.’ That’s not wrong in a philosophical sense, but it’s wrong on this test.”
“Because the test doesn’t want philosophy.”
“The test wants compliance. Learn to comply first. Philosophize later.”
She sounds like my old compliance officer.
“You know,” Daniel said, leaning back in his chair, “for someone who hates the system, you’re very good at gaming it.”
“I don’t hate the system. I understand it. Understanding and agreeing are different things.” She closed the practice book and pulled out a fresh one. “Math. Factoring quadratics. You have twenty minutes.”
“Can I have twenty-five?”
“You can have eighteen. I just shortened it because you complained.”
“That’s punitive.”
“That’s motivation. Clock starts now.”
Daniel solved quadratics for eighteen minutes while Soyeon timed him on her phone and made notes in her increasingly elaborate study-tracking system. He got all of them right—quadratic equations were, as Minji would say, “kind of dumb” but also kind of easy when you’d used them to model business projections for two decades.
“Perfect score,” Soyeon said, checking his work. “Your math has improved significantly.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank the ninety practice sets I’ve made you do.” She wrote something in her notebook—his score, presumably, added to the rolling spreadsheet of his academic evolution. “At this rate, you’ll hit ninety-fifth percentile in Math by August. Korean is the bottleneck.”
“Because Korean Literature doesn’t respond well to logic.”
“Korean Literature doesn’t respond well to anything. That’s what makes it literature.”
Meanwhile, the portfolio grew.
Daniel kept his promise to his father: five dinners a week, B+ average, and what his mother called “less of the haunted look.” He checked the market once in the morning and once at night, resisting the urge to track it in real time during class. The numbers were moving in the right direction, and obsessing over daily fluctuations was, as Soyeon had pointed out, “statistically meaningless and psychologically destructive.”
By June, the KOSPI had climbed to 1,400. Samsung Electronics was trading at 680,000 won—up thirty-nine percent from his buy price. Hyundai Motor had nearly doubled to 78,000 won. The total portfolio, including his father’s additional two million, was worth approximately 10,800,000 won.
Ten point eight million. From a starting investment of 6,320,000. In three months.
Daniel’s father had stopped asking “what if it goes down?” He’d started asking “how high can it go?” which was, in some ways, a more dangerous question. But Daniel kept his answers conservative: “I don’t know. Nobody knows. We hold and we wait.”
“The boy sounds like a monk,” his father told his mother one evening, thinking Daniel couldn’t hear. “Hold and wait. Hold and wait. Like meditation, but with money.”
“Better than gambling,” his mother replied.
“Is there a difference?”
“The difference is our son seems to know what he’s doing.”
“Seems.”
“Seems is better than nothing, Byungsoo.”
Daniel smiled in his room and went back to his Korean Literature practice test. The passage was from a modern poet—something about rain on a window and the impossibility of returning to places that exist only in memory.
He circled C: “The speaker expresses nostalgia for an irretrievable past.”
It was the correct answer. The CSAT-approved answer. The answer that Kim Soyeon would nod at and mark with a blue check.
But Daniel thought the poet might have meant something else entirely. Something about second chances. About standing at a window, watching the rain, knowing that the place you remember is right here, right now, if you just pay attention.
He didn’t write that down. Soyeon would dock him points for overthinking.
Instead, he closed the practice book, turned off his desk lamp, and listened to the sounds of his family settling into the night—his father’s television, his mother’s humming, Minji’s pencil scratching against homework.
The CSAT was in November. Five months away. SNU was the goal. The portfolio was growing. The plan was on track.
But lying in the dark, Daniel found himself thinking not about numbers or test scores or five-year plans, but about a poem about rain and the places we can never go back to.
Except he had gone back. And he was trying, every single day, to make it count.