JEDDAH — In an attempt to improve the quality of education in the Kingdom, the Ministry of Education is planning to assess the curriculums used in the system.
“The assessment has nothing to do with the students’ performance on a personal level and will not count in their GPAs,” said Saleh Al-Shamrani, the assessment’s project manager at the Ministry of Education. “They are not evaluated for the exams they take. We want to assess the quality of education in schools and thus in the Kingdom.”
The assessment will review different sample groups of students: three grades in the first phase of the survey. The fourth, eighth and twelfth grades (boys and girls) will be assessed next year. The courses to be assessed are: Islamic studies, Arabic, mathematics and science. “These are the courses that are important for academic advancement,” Al-Shamrani said.
These samples will represent all students in the Kingdom. They are chosen depending on criteria including the location of the school. “We have included schools, private and public, small and big, in all cities and villages,” he said.
This is to guarantee that the survey will apply to different samples applied to the fourth grade in next semester and on the eighth and twelfth grade starting next year.
“We chose these academic levels only after we discussed them at meetings and decided that these levels wrap up the subjects that students study in the previous years,” Al-Shamrani said.
There will be one exam for each subject in each grade. Exams given to the samples are the same for all schools and given at the same time. This is the first step in the national assessment system.
“As the project manger, I am not responsible to change the curricula after counting results of the assessment. We only give reports of the results,” he said.
