Poor school-leaving exam pass rate requires urgent action

The results of this year’s 2023-24 Ethiopian Higher Education Entrance Examination show that 5.4% of the total of 674,823 students who sat for the national exam have secured the pass mark of 50% and above. This would mean 36,409 students will qualify to join the more than 400 public and private universities operating in the country.

Compared to the past two years, when the pass rates were 3.3% and 3.2%, the results show some improvements.

Nevertheless, the figure is still indicative of the meagre number of students who will qualify to join universities in the new academic year, with dire implications for the overall efforts being made to promote improved pass rates, and for future university-level enrolment.

Top scores

Last year, the highest achievement in the natural science stream was recorded by a male student who scored 666 out of 700; 524 was recorded as the best result secured by a female in the social science stream.

The highest score this year is an astounding 675 out of 700 (natural science), and 575 out of 600 (social science). Female students recorded the highest marks, both in social sciences and natural sciences exams.

Last year, only 10 social science students scored above 500 points out of 600 and 263 natural science students scored above 600 out of 700 points. This year, the number of top scorers (500 and more out of 600) has increased to 1,201 students. About 384 of these top scorers are female students.

According to the ministry, except for the Amhara region, the performance of students in all regional states and city administrations has improved, both in percentages and actual figures. Addis Ababa, the capital city, stood out as the top region for student passes.

The decline in the Amhara region is due to a significant drop in the number of students taking the national exam, having been affected by fighting raging in the region. Only 6.6% of students in that region passed.

Despite the overall improvements this year, the number of secondary schools that did not manage to pass even a single student has increased by 200. This year, not a single student from 1,363 high schools has achieved 50%. The figure for 2021 was 1,161 schools.

The schools with no student passing the national exam are distributed across the regions. This included four schools in Addis Ababa, 33 in Afar, 36 in Benishangul, 56 in Amhara, 553 in Oromia, 156 in Somalia, and 52 in Tigray. All schools in the Harari region managed to pass students, indicating varied performance across regions.

Fate of low-performing students

The fate of students who scored below 50% and will not qualify for university education is another critical area with wider socio-political implications.

Since the enforcement of the scheme, the ministry has been setting additional cutoff points for those who scored below 50% to give a select group of students an additional opportunity to follow a four-month tutorial programme widely known as the ‘remedial programme’.

After four months of remedial lessons, these students will be allowed to sit another national exam to determine their final fate. Those who score 50% and above could be allowed to join tertiary education institutions, based on the slots available in universities.

The ministry disclosed that the remedial programme will continue this year but the number of students participating will be lower, with plans for a gradual reduction in the programme’s scale.

The experience over the past two years indicates that most of the students join private institutions for remedial programmes due to the limited places assigned for them in public universities.

Despite the additional opportunity this programme offers to failing students, the experience shows that the arrangement is fraught with challenges. These include student absenteeism, poor delivery of lessons, and inflated grades given by institutions at the end of the remedial lessons, which account for 30% of the final assessment the ministry makes at the end.

There have been many instances in which malpractices have been noted in helping undeserving students to pass. There are even rumours that the programme is triggering unethical practices whereby students try to get the favour of their teachers through corrupt means.

Unless the ministry seeks additional mechanisms to improve the integrity of the remedial programme, it will achieve very few of the objectives for which it was set up.

This year’s pass rate is a further indication of the dwindling enrolment rate being witnessed at the tertiary level across the nation. The impact on the sector of this dwindling rate is an area of serious concern.

Many institutions complain that they are working under capacity both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, following the newly enforced pass and entrance requirements, which is reducing the number of students who seek education in Ethiopian public and private universities.

Again, there appears to be no plan to address this challenge and what additional responsibilities universities could assume, taking into consideration the resources and potential they have.

Not a cause for celebration

The ministry’s disclosure of improvements in the overall student performance rate this year appears to be encouraging, but many suggest that it is not an achievement to be proud of.

To begin with, given the 95% of students who failed the exam, what has been achieved cannot be a cause célèbre.

What is rather more concerning is the fact that the ministry has not been able to point to the reasons for the slight improvement, which should be more important than the figures reported.

In fact, there is little clarity about the type of interventions being planned by the ministry directed at improving learner achievement. Given this serious gap, one cannot be sure whether next year’s results will be better or worse.

One of the critical issues raised last year which led to serious criticisms against the ministry from society and the House of Representatives was the demand to set appropriate interventions rather than simply reporting the results at the end of the year.

Owing to this demand, last year, the ministry announced a plan to devise a national strategy to overturn the trend. However, there is little clarity in terms of the details of such a plan and what has been achieved thus far.

In an article I wrote last year, I argued the need for a new national intervention plan that would help the sector address the challenges in a more systematic manner.

I also suggested the need for such a plan to involve key areas of intervention such as galvanising the whole community in a common cause; revisiting past and future policy directions and strategies at all levels of the education strata; re-examining current systems of governance, operations and accountability; deploying appropriate human, financial and material resources; and a genuine and long-term political commitment from the government to stop and reverse the downhill trend the national results continue to reveal.

Without planned interventions, the national aspirations to get more qualified students into the tertiary level will remain a nagging challenge. It will also be difficult to institute a system of accountability that will help to ensure permanent improvement in the system. No other organ of government other than the ministry is better suited to steer this huge task without any further delay.

Wondwosen Tamrat (PhD) is an associate professor of higher education and founding president of St Mary’s University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a collaborating scholar of the Programme for Research on Private Higher Education at the State University of New York at Albany, United States, and coordinator of the private higher education sub-cluster of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa. He may be reached at preswond@smuc.edu.et or wondwosen@gmail.com.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.