Education minister defends twice yearly exams, says criticisms are not justified

Education Minister Prodromos Prodromou said on Monday he is troubled that parents and teachers are still complaining about how children are being evaluated, as he announced the results of twice-yearly exams.

According to the minister, the new system provides for a unified evaluation system that is followed in schools.

He questioned people disagreeing over the new evaluation system and the introduction of the twice-yearly exams.

“What has changed? With the new student evaluation system, we have a single, structured and uniform evaluation process for all schools, for all children. Because it is unified and composed, it can be better thought out and adapted to the data,” he said.

The minister said that the evaluation system has been implemented successfully as it has been running for three years.

He added that students who will perform well will continue to do so, while students who do not do so well at the twice-yearly exams their results will give the appropriate warnings to teachers and parents, giving time to deal with lapses or issues the students might be having.

The ministry heard complaints that because of the twice-yearly written assessment “excellent students failed and were victimised.”

“These days I even saw this claim being repeated in an article,” he said.

There were excellent students, just as there were others who were rated very well, from 15 to 17 and so on.

“It is a given that both excellence and assessment always have a relativity. While the results of a student may also change over time due to various factors,” he said.

He added that through the evaluation process, a distribution of performance emerges which was as expected.

“If it was not, and wherever it appears that it is not, then a relevant discussion should be held. But, the bottom line is that the claim ‘the excellent students were victimised,’ is not verified. There were excellent ones,” he said.