Parents of students in the second stage of Thanaweya Amma (the last year of secondary school) protested against the difficulty level of the advanced mathematics exam in front of exam centers in Suez on Monday. The protests delayed the delivery of the exam papers to the control room in Ismailia.
General Hossam Aboul Magd, head of the Education Ministry’s Security Department, said that the ministry has started transferring the exams to the control center after convincing the families to end the protest. The Education Minister ordered a committee to examine the difficulty of the exam in response to the complaints.
Students complained about the difficulty of the mathematics exam and the short exam period. They also said there were many questions that differed from the sample questions provided in advance by the Education Ministry, as well as from previous years’ exams.
Al-Masry Al-Youm saw students crying while coming out of a Mounira preparatory school, saying they were upset due to the difficulty of the questions.
Reda Mosad, head of the Education Ministry's Public Education Department and head of the Thanawiya Amma exams, maintains that 75 percent of the exam questions are intended to be at a level for average students. State-run newspaper Al-Ahram quoted Mosad as saying that his department’s operation center has not received any complaints about the exam.
