On Saturday, Egypt’s Minister of Education Tarek Shawki said that 75 percent of students passed high school final exams, locally known as Thanaweya Amma in the recently concluded the academic year 2021/22.
In a video posted on the Ministry of Education’s Facebook page, Shawki said the pass rate hit 78 percent in the science branch – up from 76 percent last year; 81 percent in the mathematics branch – up from 76 percent last year; and 68 percent the humanities branch – down from 70 percent last year.
Before the start of the school year, each Thanaweya student chooses one of the three branches of science, mathematics, and humanities.
Over the past two years, the Ministry of Education has introduced a series of amendments to the Thanaweya Amma exams, which determine university prospects based on the grades obtained.
The amendments involve student-centered teaching and competency-based learning, aiming to replace the decades-long system of memorizing for tests with a system based on the comprehension of academic material.
The new system significantly lowered the passing rate and ended the phenomenon of students obtaining full marks in their senior year of high school.
In the 2019/2020 academic year, the pass rate stood at 81.5 percent.
Shawki announced the names of the top-ranking students in the final exams for each branch of Thanaweya Amma, with the top student in the science branch scoring 402 out of 410, the top student in the mathematics branch scoring 407 out of 410, and the top student in the humanities branch getting 387 out of 410.
The top score among students with special needs was 399 out of 410, the minister added.
As in the previous year, no student obtained the perfect 100 percent score this year in all subjects, Shawki said, even though top-ranking students achieved GPAs close to 100 percent.
The minister revealed that results from some schools were withheld due to suspected mass cheating cases during the exams, assuring students that are not suspected of cheating that their results will be released once the ministry’s legal affairs department and Public Prosecution conclude their investigation.
Some 650,000 high school students took the Thanaweya Amma exams this year from 20 June-21 July.
