AN EXAMINATION FOR EXAMINERS

The establishment of the National Examination Centre (NEC) in lieu of the State Commission for Student Admission (SCSA) and the Commission for Civil Service under the Azerbaijani president has generated major public reaction. Particularly alarmed are the parents of those children who will be finishing school this year and embarking on the process of applying for domestic universities. However, the next day after the presidential decree was publicized, the chairwoman of the now-abolished SCSA, Maleyka Abbaszada, held a news conference to answer questions that arose. And, perhaps, the most burning one: Will Maleyka xanim [polite mode of address or reference to a woman] lead the newly-established NEC? The answer did not take long to arrive. A day later, a presidential decree appointed Maleyka Abbaszada to the post of chair of the board of directors of the NEC. As for university admission examinations, Abbaszada said that the creation of the NEC would not have any impact on students who were preparing for admission exams. The move only constitutes a management reform.

The process of admission of applications for universities is under way and there will be no changes to the way examinations are conducted or to the process of applicants' preparation for exams.

"Applicants are notified one year in advance about changes to the way examinations are conducted. Admis-sion procedures for this year have already been announced and they cannot be changed," Abbaszada said.

It should be noted that the NEC will perform the same functions as the Commission for Student Admission. Although the SCSA also evaluated the knowledge of persons who applied for the civil service, its main work was to assess university applicants' knowledge. Therefore, this aspect in the activities of this agency attracts special attention. At the same time, Abbaszada expressed confidence that changes to management in connection with the establishment of the NEC would serve towards an even greater transparency of processes.

Time for change

Education experts are positive about the abolition of the SCSA. In particular, the executive director of the Istak network of schools, Anar Mammadov, said in an interview with R+ that since its establishment the SCSA had made a huge revolution in the provision of equal conditions for all applicants. It also provided for complete objectivity, so that even a child from the poorest family could be admitted to any educational institution after gaining the right number of scores. But the need arrived for change and a further active move.

"The problem is that many entrants applying for a variety of specialities take exams in the same disciplines. This generates not a very positive trend: a future teacher, doctor or engineer often answer the same questions. But note, however, that such a system is not always justifiable, as very many students who receive education in a particular speciality do not work in that field. We can hope that the fact that the new examination centre has been created on the basis of the SCSA will ensure objectivity," the expert believes.

In addition, criteria for student assessment should be comprehensively defined. Therefore, this move is a correct one, Mammadov believes. "I do not think that there will be radical changes - this will be a gradual process. Active awareness work should be conducted among students and parents, bulletins should be released and work should be done in many areas, including with the participation of school principals, in order to explain the need for this move," Mammadov believes.

As an example, the expert cited the following experiment that has been conducted in Azerbaijan. "Twenty-five pupils were given questions in mathematics. Within 45 minutes only five pupils were able to complete all five tasks. But an increase in the amount of time led to more pupils completing the task correctly. So, the time criterion has a negative impact and does not reflect one's actual capabilities. There are many specialities in which the time criterion is not important."

Mammadov also believes that test-based examinations contain too many questions that even capable students are not able to manage due to stress or other factors. "From form 9 to 11, a child and family focus all of their attention and strength on preparing for test-based exams. With this kind of an approach, we are nurturing caution and sketchiness, not courage. In foreign countries, in addition to studying, students at this age do sports and are involved in social life, but in our country all they do from form 9 is visit tutors, and they are not able to think boldly and freely," Mammadov concluded.

The expert believes that this country's education system should be designed in such a way that students could still have more of free time - in which case teenagers would be less exposed to stressful situations and, scary as it may sound, fewer of them would commit suicide.

What do figures suggest?

Meanwhile, depressing figures released by the SCSA in March 2016, which were revealed in the course of graduation examinations in Azerbaijan, are an indication that the overall education system itself needs serious reforms.

Students in form 9 and 11 demonstrated that they not only failed to learn minimum curriculum but could not even read or write.

"There are 24 such students in form 11 and 76 in form 9. This statistics has been revealed from protocols submitted by examinators. If we consider the fact that such cases are not recorded in the protocols of most examinators, one can assume that there actually are more of such cases, and the situation is much more dire. It is strange that these students managed to make it to form 9 and even 11," the SCSA said.

As for the results of admission examinations, among 51,818 university applicants last year there were 5,790 who finished school with honours. Twenty of them scored 0-100 points (0.35 per cent) in their admission exam, 151 scored 100-200 (2.61 per cent), 558 scored 200-300 (9.64 per cent), 2,255 scored 300-500 (38.95 per cent), and 2,806 scored 500-700 points (48.46 per cent).

"Those who finished school with honours confirmed their marks to some extent in the latest admission exams. Naturally, I would have liked them to gain more than 500 points. Analysis of the results of those who finished school with honours shows whether internal evaluation is carried out correctly in secondary schools. We started to carry out analysis in this field 10 to 15 years ago. Back then we were in shock, because among those who scored 0-100 points, 7 per cent were persons who finished school with honours, and among those who scored 0-200 points 22 per cent were persons who finished school with honours! All this showed that schools incorrectly carried out internal assessment, and marks were overstated. In 2015, only 20 people had 0-100 points, and almost half scored more than 500 points. This suggests that schools have started to approach more seriously the evaluation of students who study with honours," Maleyka Abbaszada says.

The correlation between school marks and points scored in each subject was also investigated. It was found that relatively objective assessments are made in subjects such as mother tongue, mathematics and foreign language. This is due to the fact that these disciplines are subjects in graduation examinations. "Teachers have started to be more responsible when it comes to giving the 'A' mark, but are still not quite objective when giving the 'B' mark - applicants with an average score of 4.5-5 in their high school diplomas should not score 0-100 points in their admission exam", the head of the former SCSA believes.

Yet it seems that the recent structural changes will be the basis for further, more global reforms relating to university admission examinations. This is something that Maleyka Abbaszada herself has said many times. She did not rule out the possibility of future admission to universities on the basis of the results of high school graduation examinations, like, for example, it was done in Russia. "It is possible that in the future there will only be for exams for specialities for which there is a high competition. Many want it - an admission examination will only be held for places allocated within the framework of public commission and for specialities for which there is a high competition. Admission for specialities for which there is no high competition will be based on the results of graduation examinations," Abbaszada said.

She said that for the results of graduation examinations to be taken into account those examinations need to be conducted in at least four subjects.

"The number of subjects should be increased gradually. The number of graduation exams may reach four later. In which case, for some specialities we could admit students based on the results of exams in those four subjects. But at this time it is difficult to say which specialities those will be. These may be agriculture specialities, for which we want to attract more students," the commission chairworman said.

However it may be, we would like to hope that the test-based system, which is the basis of the examination process in Azerbaijan, will not be abolished in the course of the reforms, like people suggested earlier, but will be improved. After all, the test-based system did allow many capable school leavers to enter universities and eradicated a large number of undesirable things which we had inherited from the soviet system of selection on the path to the coveted student ID.