Another Miscalculation Revealed In TEOG Exam Results

Incorrect elective course grades posted on the e-okul website, which provides information regarding the education of individual students, has contributed to the miscalculation of the results of the Transition from Primary to Secondary Education (TEOG) exam, educators have told Today's Zaman.

The TEOG exam, which was taken by approximately 1.3 million students in April, was adopted at the beginning of the 2013-2014 academic year as a new method of determining qualifications for high school admissions, replacing the previous Level Determination Examination (SBS). According to the TEOG system, eighth graders must sit for 12 exams on six subjects during the academic year. Students take six tests during the fall semester and six during the spring.

This year's TEOG exams taken on April 29 and 30 caused controversy due to problems stemming from the process of announcing the results. The Ministry of Education stated on June 24 that it had to postpone the announcement of the results due to legal proceedings launched in a dispute regarding an exam question. The ministry finally announced the results of the exam on its official website at 9 a.m. on June 29, five days after the originally scheduled date. The results announced by the Ministry of Education turned out to be wrong, due to a miscalculation of the grades of students from ethnic minorities, triggering a recount of the results.

Before the results were recalculated, another problem arose, after the headmasters of at least 291 schools incorrectly assigned grades for elective courses, allegedly because they were unable to reach the relevant teachers. Today's Zaman has learned that these headmasters assigned the same grade to each student whose grade was missing, in an effort to be fair, and that these headmasters posted these grades on the e-okul system, something they were not authorized to do. These incorrect grades were then incorporated into the results of the TEOG exam, indirectly affecting the results of every student who participated.

Union of Active Educators (Aktif Eğitim-Sen) Chairman Osman Bahçe has stated that the inclusion of the incorrect grades has contributed to the most recent announcement of false TEOG exam results. “Missing elective course grades reported incorrectly on the e-okul system means that those grades were also not included on the school reports of the eighth grade students. [If the grades were missing], how could the ministry have prepared the school reports of these students?” Bahçe asked.

Bahçe reiterated that the TEOG exam results cannot be accurate because their calculation incorporates the grades on the end-of-year school report, adding, “According to the information we have obtained from schools so far, the elective course grades of [at least] 115 students in 291 schools were not correctly represented on the e-okul online system.”

After explaining that headmasters are not authorized to announce grades on the e-okul system, he stated: “Teachers are on vacation in the summer. If the grades are announced on the e-okul system by headmasters, this constitutes a crime.”

The Ministry of Education announced that the TEOG exam results had been recounted after the miscalculation in a written press statement on its official website on Monday.

Burcu Öztürk, İstanbul (Cihan/Today's Zaman)