The headlines in Listin Diario today Monday, 17 June say that there has been little progress over the last 20 years despite the National Examinations and the work done by the Ministry of Education. According to National Examinations director Ancell Scheker Mendoza, although the ministry has achieved major improvements in overall education coverage of – that is, more students are in more classrooms – “quality continues to be a challenge.” Scheker Mendoza said that the national tests are a tool that can be used to assess what students have learned, and can therefore be used as an indicator of the quality of the Dominican educational system. She said that this year they would be conducting a comparative analysis to measure the progress of this exam system. Between 2005 and 2012 some 57,000 high school candidates failed to pass all of the tests, some of them dropped out, while others left the country. According to Scheker, the biggest obstacle is mathematics and she pointed to a lack of trained teachers in this area.
The Ministry of Education (Minerd) has invited 341,000 students to take the National Examinations at primary and secondary levels starting tomorrow Tuesday 18 and going on until Friday 21 June for the primary school candidates and from Tuesday 25 until Friday 28 June for the high school candidates. Almost 150,000 primary students will be taking the exams. According to El Nuevo Diario over 33,000 adults will be taking the tests, along with 18,400 technical studies students. The primary school tests will start with Spanish on 18 June, Mathematics on 19 June, Social Sciences on 20 June and Natural Science on 21 June. The following week the high school candidates will follow the same pattern. The Ministry notes that the students invited to take the tests include 54,000 who have at least one subject pending from the previous year’s examinations. There is a website (educando.edu.do) which offers National Test Clinics with exercises prepared for the examinations.