JEDDAH, 18 December 2004 — The administration for the final exams development project at the Ministry of Education is completing the project ahead of its implementation. At a weeklong workshop in Jeddah, the supervisors of the project trained school principals and teachers from selected boys’ and girls’ schools from all over the Kingdom on the new types of exam questions that will be introduced gradually to all final exams.

The new types of questions will focus on developing the students’ analytical and deductive thinking rather than the typical memorizing process. Usually students are given questions that are similar to if not exactly the same as what they have in their exercise books and are expected to answer word-for-word and in the same way as in their textbooks. The new questions will include essay questions that encourage them to answer in their own words and multiple-choice questions.

“The workshops assisted the teachers in preparing the questions and evaluating the students’ abilities so that they can decide on the questions that are most appropriate for their students,” explained Jawaher Mahdi, director of curriculum development unit at the Education Development Administration in Jeddah.

The boys’ administration has been working on this project for the past five years and the girls’ administration became involved a year and a half ago. Work teams analyzed the contents of each subject and established the goals for the content. They consequently put questions that serve the goals and collected the questions in a “question bank” for each subject which is accessed through the Internet.

The workshops trained the participants on how to put the questions, how to use the automatic correction machine, how to access the questions from the “questions bank” over the Internet, how to save and transfer files, and other related processes.

Each city will have a central automatic correction machine which will also evaluate and analyze the final results for the questions to determine those that might need to be changed.

There were 27 female trainees from all the provinces who would now hold workshops in their regions and train more principals and teachers. “We are in the first phase of implementing this project and once the machines are available we will start in the second school term after Haj,” Mahdi told Arab News.

Ten girls’ elementary schools in Jeddah were chosen for the initial trial period, which began last year, and 30 boys’ elementary schools have so far been introduced to the new system. “There was some resistance from the teachers and parents about this system because they are used to the old ways, but by explaining the benefits of the new system, many of them responded well,” said Samiha Basfar, one of the supervisors of the project. The parents were worried about how the new types of questions will affect their children’s grades especially that in the boys’ schools, some of the students’ grades went down in the beginning.

The teachers were worried about using the correction machines and accessing the “question banks”, but after the training they were more confident especially when they noticed the quality of the questions and how the system saved them time and effort in putting the questions and correcting them. “I expect that within a few years all the schools would have applied the new system. We already began educating the intermediary and high school teachers and principals so that they will be ready in the next phase,” said Mahdi.

“In Jeddah, there are now 8 female supervisors and 21 teachers plus members from the education development administration who participated in analyzing the subjects, preparing the questions and implementing them in the chosen schools,” said Ghada Al-Wasiah, another supervisor. While the subjects were divided among the provinces for analysis and putting the questions, the Eastern Province is where all the questions are collected from the other provinces and the results of all the workshops as the central location for storing and processing the “question banks”.