Assessing Higher Education Exit Exam in Ethiopia: Practices, Challenges and Prospects

Abstract

Ensuring quality and relevant education in Higher Education institutions is one of the challenges that remained to be solved. In a pursuit to rise educational outcomes in terms of quality and relevance, many countries currently aim to improve accountability in the school system. Many school systems provide educational outcome information. However, the Exit exam provides outcome information to be comparable across schools on an external standard. Exit exams have been argued to improve the signaling of educational achievement on the labor market and to increase labor-market productivity through increased human capital. The exit exam is intended to ensure all graduates from HEIs have developed adequate mastery of the core competencies articulated in the respective curricula thereby satisfying the requirements of the labor market and employability through the nationwide implementation of curriculum-based external exit examination. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine the current practices, and challenges on the implementation of exit exams and put forward way for its enhanced implementation. Thus, desk review of different articles, documents, policies, manuals, and guidelines was made from global and local pieces of literature. Moreover, key informants from concerned institutions including National Examination and Assessment Agency, Health Professionals Competency Assessment Licensure Directorate, Higher Education Strategy Center, and Federal Justice and Legal Research and Training Institute) were interviewed to substantiate the desk review result. Results have shown that although institutions across nations or states in a nation call exit exam in different names, the purpose in one way or another is the same, improving students' achievement, enhancing graduates performance, improve quality of education and improve graduates' competence in their respective fields of study. It has been identified that exit exam has many strength including helping to ensure common standard knowledge and practical competencies, improving public trust, improving reliability and validity of assessment tools, a tool for quality assurance to benchmark any potential problem, and helping the faculty to perform an ongoing global assessment. Moreover, several concerns regarding the scheme of exit exam including efforts and costs to maintain the process, opposing arguments, exposing potential weakness in the education system, fear of impeding flexibility within curriculum, quality and trustworthiness of the employee, ownership, exam administration, and management and cheating were indicated. Consequently, establishing independent exit exam organization, online exam administration, awareness creation before full implementation of exit exam and cost-sharing are some of the recommendations forwarded.