Can university exit exams fix some systemic problems?

The Ethiopian Ministry of Education has unveiled a plan to introduce exit exams in all undergraduate university programmes from the next academic year, starting October 2022.

The Ethiopian higher education sector currently comprises 51 public universities and about 350 private higher education institutions, with more than one million students. Currently, Ethiopian institutions graduate about 160,000 candidates annually.

The ministry’s decision can be regarded as a manifestation of decreasing trust in degrees acquired from universities and student grades, both of which are no longer regarded as a true measurement of actual academic capabilities.

The proposed scheme appears to resemble a high-stakes exam. Students who do not pass can be given additional opportunities to sit for another round of the exit exam but will not be entitled to any form of employment unless they pass.

The ministry believes that the scheme will bring about attitudinal changes by discouraging students from rampant exam cheating and helping them do their own work.

Merits and demerits of exit exams

While exit exams are common for high school students who wish to enter the university, global experience shows that they are rarely administered to students who complete their bachelor degrees.

Despite their rarity, some justify the provision of exit exams for university students by likening the logic of taking such exams to licensing examinations or the customary employer interviews or tests which graduates must sit for at the end of their university studies.

The main idea behind an exit exam is the need to check whether students have attained the intended learning outcomes of the programmes they have attended.

In fact, exit exams can offer several potential benefits if designed as a reliable measure of student learning.

There are those who argue that the competition and transparency encouraged through exit exams can help raise the declining quality of education and provide the chance for restoring confidence in a given higher education system.

Exit exams are also regarded as helpful in instituting a system of accountability and transparency through which students, instructors, higher education institutions and academic leaders can be measured for their success or failure, based on student outcomes.

This is due to the capacity of the exams to offer detailed up-to-date feedback about student performance and the system.

The academic programme reviews and benchmarking that could ensue following exit exam results can also be vital to the improvement of the quality and effectiveness of academic programmes and institutional performance.

In addition to helping pinpoint areas for development or improvement at institutional level, achievements on exit exams can offer options for individual students, who achieve higher scores, to attend higher education institutions.

Exit exams can also provide useful information to universities on the overall quality of their system with the ensuing incentive of prioritising high-quality instruction without which they may risk losing their competitiveness.

Employers can use exit exams as a means of gauging the performance and potential of recent college graduates whom they wish to employ.

However, there are also those who consider exit exams as an unnecessary intrusion in the system.

Regardless of their benefits, not all higher education institutions will necessarily see the need for such a scheme, and for a variety of reasons.

To begin with, universities are often averse to external imposition of graduation requirements, since results on such platforms could be contrary to the measurements and expectations set at an institutional level.

There are those who question the capacity of an exit exam to accurately measure what a student knows and the capacity to think in an integrative manner across disciplines.

Some also question the capacity of exit exams in measuring practical skills which are often not amenable to paper and pencil exams offered to thousands of students.

Also, students may not be ready to accept the fairness of and requirements of exit exams if they deter them from employment opportunities.

Exit exams can cause a graduation pile-up when a significant number of students fail to score passing grades. This can be embarrassing for the particular university in question and the system as a whole.

Sometimes, the urge to chase exit exams can lead institutions to focus on this particular task by employing every strategy possible.

The excessive desire to perform well against other competitors may involve various illicit acts, including indulging in corrupt and fraudulent practices.

Past experience and new plan

The decision to offer exit exams for Ethiopian graduates may not be regarded as new, given the fact that similar exams have been on offer to law and health science graduates.

The exit exam in law is the first to have been introduced in Ethiopia in 2010-11. Its major objective has been to check whether the graduate profile and learning outcomes of the LLB curriculum have been achieved.

The health exam was launched by the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health in 2015 as a National Licensing Examination for health professionals in Ethiopia.

It is used as a requirement for registration, licensing and employment purposes. It is a collaborative venture between the Health Professionals Licensure Examinations Directorate, or HPLED, and the ministry of health and the Institute of Educational Research at Addis Ababa University.

The national scores from both exams show a mix of results. Among the nearly 12,000 law school students who sat for the exit examinations for the years 2006-9, only about 45% managed to pass.

The figures for the years 2018-19 and 2019-20 indicate that the average pass rate of regular day programme male/female health students increased from 56 (40%) to 70 (66%), respectively, while that of male/female students from the continuous education programme (evening class and distance students) went down from 81 (95%) to 68 (77%), respectively.

Similarly, the average pass rate of regular male/female law students increased from 80 (77%) to 82 (84%), respectively, while that of continuous education programme male/female students was 19 (12%) and 11 (32%), respectively. The latter figures mean an increase for female students as compared to male students whose pass rate decreased by 8% between 2018-19 and 2019-20.

Overall, national trends indicate that candidates from public institutions and regular undergraduates perform better than those enrolled in private higher education institutions and those in distance, evening and summer programmes.

Anticipated challenges

The experience accumulated in law and health programmes should provide relevant information in planning and administering the new examinations across all disciplines and universities in Ethiopia.

However, there appears to be limited empirical evidence that can serve as a basis to examine the strength and weaknesses of the exams and provide the needed lessons.

The limited information available in the sector suggests that, among a variety of challenges faced, are issues related to the representativeness, clarity and quality of exam questions, the level of attention given by higher education institutions to the exam, and challenges related to infrastructure and finance.

In addition to the above, the technical components of determining exam contents, item development and standard setting and the overall logistics of the exam require proper planning, awareness raising, training and employing the right people.

Currently, besides announcing its new plans, the ministry has started holding discussions with higher education institutions and relevant stakeholders and preparing respective guidelines.

However, the human, financial and organisational needs are substantial, given the remaining time and the ministry’s ambitious plan of introducing the exam in all undergraduate programmes of all higher education institutions.

Towards a comprehensive solution

The introduction of exit exams in Ethiopia appears to have been driven by the interest to impact on individual behaviour, institutional reform and system improvement.

However, the sector should guard against a romanticised perception of the benefits and assuming that the introduction of an exit exam alone will generate the expected outcomes.

The ministry of education should specifically ensure that the new plan, like many of its predecessors, will not be used as another mechanism of ‘putting in patches’ to fix the varied challenges the system is experiencing.

Restoring confidence in the higher education system requires going beyond single interventions and introducing comprehensive mechanisms that address the multifarious challenges the system continues to experience.

In this regard, it is worth referring to Ethiopia’s 2018 Education Development Roadmap which has identified the need for addressing key challenges in the sector: issues of access, equity, diversity, quality, relevance, efficiency, research, technology transfer and community services, and financing.

Hence, while using individual interventions such as exit exams may have its own benefit, the government should hasten to implement an overall holistic and integrated national plan that responds to the various challenges in the system.

Wondwosen Tamrat (PhD) is an associate professor and founding president of St Mary’s University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a collaborating scholar of the Programme for Research on Private Higher Education at the State University of New York at Albany, United States, and coordinator of the private higher education sub-cluster of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa. He may be reached at preswond@smuc.edu.et or wondwosen@gmail.com. This is a commentary.