The end of the school year is an emotional time for students — many don’t get the grades they hoped for, while some find they have done better than they dreamed. In a society where certificates and diplomas are common currency, and just one set of exams (the thanaweya amma) decides whether or not you can go to university, the stakes are high, and students, teachers and education officials are under a lot of pressure.

The thanaweya amma, referring to both the exams and the certificate securing a student’s entrance into university, has long posed an academic, psychological and financial burden on Egyptian homes as students struggle and parents are forced to pay large sums of money for private lessons. It is to ease these pressures that Minister of Education Yousry El-Gamal recently announced that a new exam system will be implemented in schools from 2010, giving the Ministry of Education two years to train teachers and set the curriculum.

Pending approval by the People’s Assembly (PA), the reformed thanaweya amma will be divided into mandatory subjects and optional subjects, chosen according to the student’s planned course of study at university.

Fifty percent of the student’s final grade will be based on the final exam taken at the end of the school year and the other 50 percent will be based on the student’s academic performance throughout the year. Additionally, the final examination grade will no longer be the sole determinant of the student’s acceptance into university.

“It is still a work in progress,” says Farid Abd El Samee, official spokesperson for the Ministry of Education. He added that the Ministry has established the general framework for the new system, but the details are yet to be agreed upon. The reaction from teachers and students is predictably mixed — many view the new exam system with skepticism, but most agree that reform is desperately needed. The pressure to attain that higher final grade and thus make it into university is often unbearable for students, to the point that some of them take their own lives. During this academic year alone, two students studying for the thanaweya amma, Hassan Mohamed Yousry and Mirhan Hany Salem, committed suicide because they were afraid they might fail. Yousry, 16, committed suicide after taking his mathematics exam, which he feared he had failed, and Salem, 18, jumped from her sixth floor balcony in order to avoid her mechanics exam, according to reports by local daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

“The change is long overdue,” says Teresa Girguis, a chemistry teacher at Masr El-Gedida Secondary School for Girls who has witnessed her students growing more and more frustrated with their education and losing motivation. “By the second year, the student is only interested in taking the easiest subject so that he or she can get a higher final grade,” she added. A thanaweya amma student from the same school, Fatma Al Zahraa Ibrahim, says that even though she is not too optimistic about the new system, she still believes that it is a step forward on the road to educational development in Egypt.

One person who would strongly disagree with that statement is Abdel Hafeez Tayel, head of the Center for Educational Rights, a non-governmental organization that defends the right to a better educational system in Egypt.

Tayel believes that the new system will be an easy-fix the Ministry has devised in order to spend as little money as possible on improving the education system, and that the government is backing out of its responsibilities to the nation’s students. “The project itself is a way to diminish the thanaweya amma certificate, since people were complaining that it is too difficult, by creating an alternate way to enter college; the entry exams,” he says, adding that students graduating from the ‘improved’ thanaweya amma will not be equipped for college since their secondary school education will have deteriorated.

If the government wants to introduce optional subjects to the thanaweya amma, then it should do so after developing the students’ education in school so that they are properly prepared to specialize in their chosen field by the time they get to college, suggests Tayel. For students, the freedom to choose a number of their subjects is the most attractive aspect of the new thanaweya amma. “The optional subjects will allow the student to excel in the field that he or she has chosen,” says Ibrahim. But again, Tayel disagrees. “Most students will happily accept any change in the system, since the thanaweya amma has exhausted Egyptian families, but once the new system is implemented then they will realize that it is even more exhausting and strenuous,” he says.

Tayel predicts that once the new system is applied, the number of private schools and universities will increase, since the system will not be applied to them. Additionally, the necessity for private lessons will also increase, since public schools will not have enough resources to properly support the new system.

Although the situation for Egyptian students and educators could be much worse, they also have little faith that it will improve: In 2005, Ahmed Gamaleddin Moussa, former Minister of Education, seemed keen to change the thanaweya amma by reducing the number of compulsory subjects and introducing optional ones into the system. Despite Moussa claiming that reform plans were already in action in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, the new system was never implemented.

Radwa Abdel Hamid, a thanaweya amma student in her final year at Masr El-Gedida, failed two of her exams last year, making her plan to study tourism and hospitality a distant dream. “We work hard to memorize information that we don’t use in college, we benefit from nothing in our education and when we graduate we struggle to find work as the unemployment rate continues to rise in Egypt,” says Abdel Hamid. “The Egyptian youth are willing to work hard and we do have potential but [no-one will] give us a break.”  et