The continued confusion regarding “Tawjihi”

Al Ghad’s Shurouq Tumar said that after much waiting and many demands from Tawjihi students (high school seniors) and their families for measures from the Ministry of Education adequate enough to face this year’s exceptional challenges, the ministry came out with uncalculated decisions that affirmed the students’ frustrations.

Students anticipated decisions that would alleviate their stress after the suspension of schools attendance as an anti-COVID-19 measure.

However, they were instead shocked and upset by the ministry’s decision to issue a condensed exam schedule that cuts the usual exams period to five days, Tumar said.

The writer said that since the beginning of the crisis, Tawjihi students have suffered additional anxiety and confusion due to the ministry’s “slow and ambiguous” statements and arrangements that often attempted to reassure students without offering them actually reassuring information or announcements, which further fuelled their frustration.

She said that the ministry had recently announced its decision to omit the last unit of each subject material from its respective exam, by which the ministry admits that remote education in its current form cannot be considered an alternative to conventional education.

The columnist said that the ministry’s decision to omit the last units is a long-awaited demand, but it took the ministry so long to take it that students had already studied the full materials, which upset them for wasting their efforts that were doubled in light of remote learning.

Tumar said that the Ministry of Education today is required to reconsider its unfortunate decision to compress the Tawjihi exam schedule into 50 per cent of its usual period while it still has the time to do so.