By Daewoung Kim and Jimin Jung
SEOUL (Reuters) - Half a million&nbsp;South&nbsp;Koreans&nbsp;sat for the annual nationwide&nbsp;college&nbsp;entrance&nbsp;exam&nbsp;on Thursday, the&nbsp;first&nbsp;time in four years that the&nbsp;exam, often considered life-defining in the highly competitive society, has&nbsp;taken place&nbsp;free&nbsp;of&nbsp;pandemic&nbsp;rules.
This year, nearly 505,000 high school students, graduates and others signed up to&nbsp;take&nbsp;the single-day, five-session&nbsp;College&nbsp;Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) held at 1,279 test sites across the country, the education ministry said.
Test-takers were not required to wear face&nbsp;masks, unlike the previous three years.
The annual&nbsp;exam&nbsp;is widely considered one of the most important tests in the country. Even airline flights are suspended during the listening comprehension portion of the English test.
South&nbsp;Korean financial markets opened an hour later than usual at 10 a.m. (0100 GMT) to ease traffic.
Outside schools, parents cheered for their children, hugging them and some wiping away tears.
"I feel so nervous. Maybe I'm more nervous (than my daughter)," said Kim Mi-jae, mother of a 18-year-old student, after sending off her daughter for the&nbsp;exam&nbsp;at a high school in Seoul.
The difficulty of this year's&nbsp;exam&nbsp;has yet to be confirmed, but&nbsp;South&nbsp;Korean officials have said it would not include the so-called "killer questions" typically drawn from material not covered in public school curriculum.
President Yoon Suk Yeol has blamed such questions as the cause of excessive spending in private education, one of the factors behind the country's declining fertility rate.
South&nbsp;Koreans&nbsp;spent a record 26 trillion won ($19.97 billion) on private education last year, despite a declining student population, a government report showed.
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(Reporting by Daewung Kim, Jimin Jung; Writing by Soo-hyang Choi. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

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South Koreans take first mask-free college exam since pandemic