‘No changes to Tawjihi’s single session system, evaluation’

AMMAN — The Ministry of Education is scheduled to begin receiving Tawjihi (general secondary education certificate examination) applications starting February 16, Ministry Spokesperson Waleed Jallad told The Jordan Times on Sunday.

Around the same time, the ministry will unveil two proposals for the examination schedules of all academic branches, he said, noting that in order to find the most suitable schedule, the proposed schedules will be reviewed and voted on by the students in a referendum.

“There will be no change in this year’s Tawjihi examinations’ single session system, or in the mechanisms used to calculate grades and marks,” Education Minister Tayseer Nuaimi said on Saturday in a statement made available to The Jordan Times.

Last year was the first in 16 years that the Tawjihi examinations were held in a single session at the end of the year instead of two sessions. The number of subjects tested in the exam was also reduced from eight to seven to alleviate the burden on students.

The educational sector is "vital", Nuaimi stressed, adding that the ministry established a "firm strategy" in 2018 to organise various initiatives, projects and awareness-raising campaigns to maintain qualitative development in education and make optimal use of the field's human resources.

Government expenditures on education account for 12.2 per cent of total spending, representing about 3.8 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, Nuaimi said.

In regards to enrolment, the minister stated that the total KG2 enrolment rate currently stands at 84 per cent, enrolment in elementary education is at 98.5 per cent and enrolment in secondary education at 80 per cent. Enrolment in vocational education stands at 12.3 per cent, a percentage that the ministry seeks to raise, according to the statement.

The estimated tuition costs at schools with less than 100 students are JD1,379 per student, whereas tuition costs at schools with more than 1,000 students amount to JD430 per student, according to a recent study by the ministry.