Yemen Monitor/Newsroom
Yemeni Prime Minister Ahmed Awad bin Mubarak directed the Minister of Education, Tariq Salem Al-Akbari, on Sunday, to review the results of the 2023/2024 high school exams, amid widespread protests and grievances from students in the governorate.
This came in two phone calls received by the Governor of Taiz, Nabil Shamsan, today from the Yemeni Prime Minister and the Minister of Education, according to the governorate’s official media.
The Minister of Education affirmed the ministry’s commitment to implementing the directives of the Prime Minister to review the results of the high school exams, based on a letter submitted by the governor of the governorate, which included the governorate’s observations on the results of the high school exams.
The Deputy Minister of Education and head of the Supreme Examinations Committee had previously issued a decision not to add cumulative grades for a subject to a student’s score if they did not obtain at least 25 marks in the final exam, which is contrary to the existing decision of the Minister of Education and has been in effect for four years.
The governor, in a memorandum addressed to the Minister of Education, called for a review of the high school results for the academic year 2023-2024 and a reversal of the decision to deduct cumulative grades from students’ scores, considering it a student’s acquired right that cannot be deducted under any pretext.
Meanwhile, dozens of male and female students staged a protest in front of the temporary governorate building, chanting slogans demanding an end to the injustice and a re-grading of the exam papers by an independent university committee.
The students demanded a reversal of the arbitrary decision issued by the Ministry of Education, which they were unaware of until the results were released, and which involved canceling the cumulative grade for any subject in which a student did not obtain 25 marks.
The announcement of the results came as a major shock to thousands of students and their parents, as the failure rate in the governorate reached 55%, with a total of 26,400 students sitting for the exams, of whom 14,800 failed.
