Ankara court cancels last year’s high school entrance exam results

Aysel ALP ISTANBUL / HÜRRİYET

Hürriyet Photo

An Ankara district administrative court has cancelled last year’s high school entrance exam results due to miscalculation, according to main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy Aydın Apaydın.

A huge scandal had erupted after the Education Ministry admitted that the results of 718 students had been wrongly assessed due to a calculation error.

Ankara’s 18th Administrative Court ordered a stay of execution for the results on Jan. 16, after a student filed a complaint over the miscalculation. The court subsequently rejected an appeal from the Education Ministry against the stay of execution.

Apaydın’s lawyer, who filed a collective complaint on behalf of students who were subject to the miscalculation, said the results of the 1,112,604 students should be re-calculated.

However, officials from the Education Ministry said they had not received a notification regarding the order.

The head of the Education and Science Personnel Union (Eğitim-Sen), Ünsal Yıldız, said the government should pay compensation to the students affected by the situation.

The court had previously stated that even the smallest mistake had the potential to negatively affect many of the 1,112,604 students who passed the nationwide exam, known as the SBS, in June 2013.

The mistake was discovered after parents claimed that the French and German-language tests had been wrongly marked, based on their own evaluations after the exam.

A reassessment will likely mean that students may have to change the schools where they are enrolled to start in September 2013.

The SBS controversy is not the first nationwide exam scandal, as in 2011 the university entrance exams were marred by allegations that a code could be used to crack all the answers.