Students Accuse the Minister of Education and Science of Lies

Students and their parents are dissatisfied with the university entrance exams and are protesting against them. They believe that the system is not working fairly and express their mistrust in the new educational reforms.

One of the reasons behind their protests is that the Ministry of Education and Science cheated them by only offering three hundred places, despite there being six hundred initially available. Most of the offers for places were made in the regions - something the students and their parents do not accept.

The Ministry of Education and Science offered six hundred vacant places to students, after the exams were over. Several days ago, it turned out that only three hundred places were still free. The National Assessment and Examination Centre explains that the other three hundred places were given to international students, who were admitted to the universities before the national exams took place.

According to data from the National Assessment and Examination Centre 19,100 students were admitted to higher education institutions. A competition for the vacant places was opened after publishing the list of students already admitted.

“It is hard to differentiate our Ministry of Education and Science from a kindergarten,” says Katie M. (a student), “It is ridiculous to make such mistake and offer six hundred free places, instead of three hundred. I cannot understand why they are cheating us? They published final list of students a week late, which made us feel very nervous. We are also human beings, not robots and we have feelings. A Minister should not make such mistakes.”

Other students talk about various violations that took place during the exams: “The appeals process should have been started after final list was published. They did it vice versa. If the student does not know if he was admitted or not, how he can appeal? They did it to avoid appeals.”

According to the students, they do not even get clear answers from the National Assessment and Examination Centre and most of the students do not know how much scholarship they have been granted. “I finally found out that my son received a score of 864. I called several times to the Centre to find out if the state was financing him or not. Nobody knew if he would receive any grant. Everyone says, ‘we are busy’ and ‘check it on our web-page’. We could not find any information about it on the web-page,” says one of the parents.

We tried to contact representatives of the National Assessment and Examination Centre for comments about the situation. However, representatives of the Centre only told us that it is just angry students, who have not been admitted, who are protesting. They state that students can appeal to a special commission in cases where there is a genuine problem. “If somebody wants to get information about a grant, they can visit our web-page,” say representatives of National Assessment and Examination Centre.

Eka Gulua