By: Abyot Alemu
The release of this year’s national high school leaving exam results once again laid bare the deep fractures of Ethiopia’s education system. Government officials were quick to hail the marginal rise in the pass rate as “progress,” but the truth cannot be hidden behind numbers. The overwhelming fact remains that the vast majority of Ethiopian students were told they had failed. For these young people, the doors of higher education were slammed shut, and years of effort and sacrifice ended in despair.
But this crisis is not simply about students performing poorly. It is the culmination of a system that is profoundly unequal, structurally broken, and politically mismanaged.
Unequal Schools, One Exam
At the heart of the problem lies a basic question of fairness: how can students from vastly different learning environments be judged by the same national exam?
In Addis Ababa and other urban centers, students in private schools sit in classrooms equipped with libraries, science laboratories, internet access, and supplementary tutorials. Their teachers are better trained, better paid, and closely supervised. Their learning environment is intentionally structured for success. Contrast this with their rural counterparts, where overcrowded classrooms may have one teacher for seventy students, no laboratory, no library, and sometimes not even desks. Electricity and internet are luxuries, and textbooks are shared among many.
When both groups face the same national exam, the game is fixed long before they ever reach the exam hall. The competition is less about merit and effort and more about privilege and geography. To insist that this exam is “merit-based” is to willfully ignore the stark inequality that defines Ethiopian education.
Corruption and Questionable Integrity
Even within the privileged, another distortion lurks. Across Addis Ababa and other towns, there are persistent whispers that some private schools shield their students not only with resources but with dishonesty. Rumors of leaked exam papers, permissive invigilators, and organized cheating have spread so widely that they can no longer be dismissed as idle gossip. The pattern of results—where certain private schools consistently produce disproportionate numbers of passing students—only fuels suspicion.
An exam that cannot guarantee integrity ceases to be a measure of learning. It becomes a symbol of corruption. And once the credibility of the national exam is eroded, the legitimacy of the entire education system falls into question.
A Pipeline Designed to Exclude
The roots of the problem reach back far earlier than Grade 12. From the first day of schooling, the system is riddled with structural inequities.
Pre-primary education remains a privilege of the few, with most rural children starting Grade 1 already disadvantaged. Primary schools in rural areas struggle with teacher shortages, inadequate textbooks, and crumbling infrastructure. As students move into secondary school, the divide grows wider—urban students exposed to laboratories and internet-enabled research, while rural students encounter only chalkboards and rote learning.
By the time they reach Grade 12, many rural students have never seen a functioning science laboratory, yet they are tested on experiments they could only imagine. For most, the exam is less an opportunity than a sentence. Rather than correcting systemic inequities, the national exam becomes the final trap door, excluding nine out of ten students from higher education.
This is not an education system designed to uplift. It is a system designed to filter out the poor and reward the privileged.
The Silence of the Scholars
What makes this crisis even more troubling is the silence of Ethiopia’s education scholars, researchers, and professional associations. While government officials spin failure as reform and parents cry out in anguish, the intellectual class remains disturbingly quiet. The universities, which should be spaces of critical reflection and policy innovation, have too often become echo chambers of government narratives.
This silence is not neutral; it is complicity. By failing to speak against an unjust system, the country’s education scholars allow inequality to deepen and public trust to erode. In other societies, such silence in the face of systemic injustice has been judged harshly by history. Ethiopia’s academic community risks the same fate unless it finds its voice.
Consequences Beyond the Classroom
The cost of this crisis cannot be measured only in exam statistics. It is a national question with political, economic, and social consequences.
Disillusioned youth who see their dreams crushed by a rigged system lose faith not only in education but also in the state itself. Ethiopia already faces a fragile economy unable to create enough jobs; locking students out of higher education only fuels unemployment, hopelessness, and migration pressure. Families with means send their children abroad, accelerating brain drain, while the poor are left to dangerous migration routes or to join the ranks of the underemployed.
Other countries have learned this lesson the hard way. In Sierra Leone and Nigeria, the systematic exclusion of youth from opportunity turned frustration into fuel for unrest. Ethiopia, if it continues down this path, risks repeating the same mistakes.
Comparative Lessons from Elsewhere
Ethiopia’s crisis is not inevitable. Countries that once faced similar challenges have chosen differently—and reaped the rewards.
- Vietnam invested heavily in teacher training and ensured that every school met national minimum standards for libraries, laboratories, and textbooks. Today, its public-school students outperform those in many developed nations.
- Finland abandoned high-stakes school-leaving exams decades ago, replacing them with continuous assessment, teacher autonomy, and equal resource distribution. The result was a system that delivers both equity and excellence.
- South Korea turned its rural schools into centers of excellence through massive state investment and strict accountability, ensuring that geography did not dictate destiny.
- Kenya reformed its vocational training system by linking it directly to industries, modernizing curricula, and introducing apprenticeships that created real jobs for graduates.
These examples show that when education is treated as a public good rather than a filtering mechanism, nations can transform exclusion into opportunity.
Rethinking the Exam: Better Assessment Models
If Ethiopia must have a national exam, it should not be designed as a single, high-stakes gatekeeper. Lessons from other nations suggest alternatives:
- Continuous Assessment: Rather than a one-time exam, student performance should be evaluated over multiple years through classroom assessments, projects, and teacher evaluations. This approach, widely used in Finland and increasingly in East African countries, reduces pressure and gives a fuller picture of learning.
- Multiple Pathways: Instead of one national exam deciding every student’s fate, Ethiopia could create diversified pathways—academic, technical, and vocational—each with its own fair and rigorous assessment. Germany’s dual-track model shows how this can be done without stigmatizing vocational education.
- Context-Sensitive Testing: Exams should reflect the realities of the schools students come from. If rural schools lack laboratories, assessments should be adjusted or complemented with practical learning programs that bridge such gaps. South Korea’s targeted investment in rural learning resources is a lesson here.
- Independent Oversight: To restore credibility, exam preparation and administration should be placed under an autonomous body, free from political manipulation and corruption. Rwanda’s reforms in this area are worth studying.
A Nation Failing Its Youth
Ethiopia’s education crisis is not just about exam scores; it is about the values that guide national policy. It is about a government that celebrates exclusion as reform. It is about a system that rewards privilege and punishes poverty. It is about the silence of scholars who should speak truth to power but choose quiet comfort instead.
The youth of Ethiopia deserve more than hollow statistics. They deserve a system that invests in their potential, one that opens doors instead of slamming them shut. If the state continues to measure progress by how many students it can exclude, it will discover that the real exam it is failing is not written on paper, but in the lives and futures of its young people.