Türkiye to introduce centralized written exam system in schools

ANKARA

High school students focus intensely on their exam papers during a nationwide examination in a classroom setting.

The Education Ministry will introduce a centralized written examination system in middle and high schools, drawing most questions from a national question bank in a move aimed at standardizing assessment across schools.

The Common Written Exam System (OYSS) will be implemented starting with the first written exams of the first semester of the 2026-2027 academic year. The system will cover 16 subjects in grades five through seven in middle schools and grades nine through 11 in high schools.

Exams will consist of open-ended questions. Teachers of the same subject will jointly prepare two questions, while the remaining questions will be selected automatically from a ministry-managed question bank according to difficulty levels chosen by teachers.

The ministry aims to upload around 8,000 questions to the bank before the first round of common exams and develop approximately 8,000 additional questions for each subsequent examination period. Artificial intelligence will also be incorporated into question development and the grading of open-ended answers.

The ministry says the system is intended to make assessment more objective, improve consistency between different school types and educational levels, and ensure that year-end achievement scores are determined more fairly.

However, education unions and teachers have raised concerns about unequal educational resources across regions, reduced teacher autonomy and increased administrative workloads. Some teachers say paperwork already takes time away from classroom instruction and that entering individual students’ scores for each question could prove particularly burdensome in overcrowded classrooms.

Gülşah Batdal Karaduman of Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa’s Faculty of Education said common exams should be used not only to compare achievement scores but also to identify schools, regions and student groups requiring additional support. A shared assessment standard could contribute to fairer evaluation, she said, but genuine equality of opportunity depended on reducing disparities in learning conditions.