Millions of students and their families are anxious about the exam that will replace TEOG, the assessment that determined the transition from primary to secondary education. Schools have reopened and the academic year is underway, yet a clear explanation of the new exam system has not been provided since the announcement that TEOG would be abolished. Studies and research on alternatives continue. The Ministry of National Education has reportedly sent a directive to provincial education directorates requesting that, for this year, an exam called the National Monitoring Exam (MİS) be administered to 5th grade students for the first time. The ministry has indicated the exam will focus on Turkish, Mathematics and Science, using the first four themes in those subjects. The plan is to pilot the system in 15 metropolitan municipalities and a total of 24 provinces.
What Will the National Monitoring Exam Questions Be Like?
The Ministry of National Education has been planning changes to the primary-to-secondary transition exams for several years and has continued related R&D work. Because no final system had been determined, details were not made public earlier. After President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated, “I am in favor of eliminating the TEOG exam,” the ministry accelerated its work and announced that TEOG would be removed and a new exam system would be introduced shortly. We learned that the ministry drafted a pilot program called the National Monitoring Exam and sent documentation to 24 provinces selected as pilot regions detailing a plan to administer the new exam to 5th graders in 2017.
As indicated in earlier statements by Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, the new National Monitoring Exam is expected to include open-ended questions. The proposed content areas for the exam are as follows: for Turkish, reading competencies around the themes “Children’s World,” “National Struggle and Atatürk,” “Virtues,” and “Science and Technology”; for Mathematics, the topics “Natural Numbers,” “Operations on Natural Numbers,” “Fractions,” and “Operations with Fractions”; and for Science, the first three units: “Earth, Sun and Moon,” “The World of Living Things,” and “Measuring Force and Friction.”
The National Monitoring Exam and the Pilot Provinces
The National Monitoring Exam is expected to be implemented initially only in pilot provinces. These include Aydın, Bursa, Erzurum, Mardin, Mersin, Konya, Gaziantep, Kayseri and Trabzon, along with other locations, totaling 24 provinces and including 15 metropolitan municipalities.
The uncertainty and changes to the exam system have unsettled students and families, and they have also affected textbook sellers, publishers, printers and authors. Many stakeholders were caught unprepared and have suffered significant financial losses. Because an official, detailed announcement about the new system has not yet been issued, sales of TEOG-related resources have reportedly declined by nearly 80% compared with previous years.