Focus on scholarship testing

"We are trying to create a new citizen," says the charismatic but soft-spoken former Kyrgyz education minister, "to arm the people with something new, to make them flexible and able to respond to the market." Camilla Sharshekeeva, the former cabinet minister, now provost of the American University in Kyrgyzstan (AUK), believes that the country’s future is in the hands of the educators responsible for training Kyrgyzstan’s future leaders. Scholarships at prestigious Kyrgyz universities have traditionally been for sale. For example, it is said to cost US $2,500 to enter the country’s Medical Academy. Rectors have traditionally been the main beneficiaries of these payments, to supplement their official monthly salaries of between $60 and $80. This year, the education ministry announced a "revolution in education", - the country’s first-ever nationwide transparent scholarship test. "It was an extremely political issue," Todd Drummond, the country director for the American Councils for International Education (ACCELS), which designed the test, told IRIN. "There was strong resistance from the rectors, who had a lot to lose, as well as from the country’s conservative education establishment." The National Merit Scholarship Test (NMST), to which students all over the country were subjected, determined who would be offered scholarships to which Kyrgyz universities. Its content was developed with the assistance of an educational testing service consultant from the US. Formerly, scholarships had never been awarded on merit in Kyrgyzstan. Expanding opportunities A total of 13,655 high school graduates sat for the NMST, which was offered in Russian and Uzbek, as well as in Kyrgyz. Nearly 60 percent of those tested were women, who scored higher overall marks than their male counterparts. Most of Kyrgyzstan’s best high schools are in urban centres, and their teaching medium is Russian. The distribution of scholarship awards took this into account, as "the 83 percent of the nation’s high schools which are rural don’t provide the same level of education [as that provided] in the cities", according to Irina Poluektova of EdNet/CARANA, as USAID-funded body with overall responsibility for the NMST. Several post-test statistics confirmed this discrepancy. One showed that those taking the NMST in Russian had scored 22 percent higher on average than those taking it in Kyrgyz, although the latter group outnumbered the former by nearly 250 percent. As so many high schools are in the villages, the NMST was administered in 31 geographically distributed centres countrywide. Previous entrance examinations for universities in the capital, Bishkek, were held only in the capital, and "sometimes kids did not have the money to come all that way to sit for the exam," said Asel Samakova, an AUK undergraduate who took the NMST in Balykchy, near Issyk-Kul. The ministry designed the scholarship distribution process so that young people from rural districts would get preferential access. "Sooner or later," Sharshekeeva explained, "some people from rural areas will come to power in this country. We need to provide them with a good education now, so that they can lead the country well when that time comes." Sixty percent of the 5,103 scholarships awarded under the NMST system accordingly went to rural students. Assessing assessment "The popular view is that the test’s biggest impact has been in fighting corruption," said Drummond. While conceding that this was true, he said he believed that its greatest success was in introducing new assessment methodologies which concentrated on mathematical reasoning and independent thinking. Testing was a great way to start reform, he told IRIN. If you wanted real reform, then "changing the assessment methodologies" was the best way to provide new incentives. Building on this, Sharshekeeva asserted that successful citizens were now "proactive people who can lead situations, think critically, understand links between causes and effects, make decisions, and create jobs. Now, we have to start retraining teachers, as well as change academic standards and the content of textbooks in the context of the ‘new citizen'." Quotas - a necessary evil? A controversial aspect of this process was that a centrally mandated quota system decided the number and location of scholarship spots available for each field of study. As a result, nearly half the scholarships were earmarked for pedagogical studies and a disproportionate number were set aside for science. "Certain fields are very popular," said John Clark, the EdNet/CARANA country director. "The government allotted only 40 scholarship places nationwide for law, and only 80 for business and economics. This has caused an overload of qualified students for some majors, while we are trying to fill spots in other subjects." Drummond said nearly half the students from Bishkek who were granted scholarships had turned them down because of these quotas, although students from rural areas were generally accepting. He said about 75 percent of the scholarships had been accepted as of 6 September. Madeleine Reeves, a former co-head of the sociology department at AUK, who is pursuing her doctorate at Cambridge University, has recently written a chapter on the NMST as part of a forthcoming book on educational reform in Kyrgyzstan. In it she said the quota controversy had come about because the test was trying to do so many things simultaneously. "While on one hand it was fighting corruption in the award process, it was also an exercise in training the specialists that the government believed the country needs," she said. Results Rural students have especially benefited from the NMST, as many of them now have opportunities they would not have had otherwise. Drummond said that at least half the rural students awarded scholarships could otherwise never have gone to university. Those involved agree that it is still too early to tell if the process is building a new merit-based view of success in the eyes of the country’s future leaders. However, according to Reeves, "this process has challenged the [rectors'] fief-like control over questions of university intake. It had previously been an unmonitored process that let people enter not on the basis of what they knew, but on how much money they could pay." The way forward Many believe that this was very much a guinea-pig year for the test, with many lessons learned. Sharshekeeva told IRIN she was satisfied, because "even if it didn’t work 100 percent", a strong step had been taken towards "distributing scholarships equally and fairly" It is generally expected that another NMST will take place in 2003. That is because President Askar Akayev, a former academic himself, has publicly supported it, and Ishinkul’ Boljarova, the new education minister, is already working with EdNet/CARANA on next year’s test.