The study examined the perceptions of English teachers on the new criterion-referenced assessment in the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT). Incorporating a qualitative study, we recruited ten secondary school English teachers working in a central province of Korea and collected data from two email interviews. The findings illustrate that most teachers showed a negative attitude toward the new policy, believing that it would not bring any positive change as it was intended only to cause greater fervor for private tutoring, thereby aggravating the burden of both students and parents. They also did not believe that the new policy would promote communicative language teaching, pointing to the reality of overcrowded classes and lack of teacher training. The fact that the new policy does not require testing students’ communicative competence was another major source of the teachers’ distrust in its potential to make classrooms more communicative. Problematizing the hitherto top-down and capricious policy implementation with regard to the CSAT, the teachers argued for the need to have a long-term and reliable approach to policy planning to bring about successful education reform.