On the Right Track? Iran Edges Toward Education Reform
11 Dec 2007 in Education, Employment
Djavad Salehi Isfahani is Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech and a Visiting Fellow at Brookings.
After several years of public debate, Iran has finally adopted into law the guidelines to eliminate the national university entrance examinations – the infamous concour. The law requires the government to replace the big test by 2011 with scores from the previous three years of high school.
The concour has been the single most important event in young people’s lives for the past half a century and is what most Iranian students have come to view as the ultimate purpose of going to school. The score they obtain in the big test is fed into computers along with their rankings of schools and programs of their choice which then determine career tracks (or lack thereof). Each student is assigned to the highest program on his or her list that is supported by the student’s score. This selection system works well for the roughly ten percent of the 1.3 million contenders who are chosen to enroll in a public university, but very poorly for the rest who face paying large fees for private schools or join the ranks of the unemployed high school graduates.
The impact of the test on education is to narrow down the goal of learning to enrich one’s quality of life to that of passing a single multiple-choice test. At a time when the country needs to train its young with a wide range of skills that enables them to compete in the global marketplace, the narrow focus of Iran’s education has become an obstacle in economic development. At the level of the family, the concour is much disliked because of the immense stress it generates for the entire family and the huge financial burden it places on parents to pay for private school and private tutors. For years I have watched child and education psychologists lament on Iranian television the negative effects of the big test on child development. We are told that teaching and learning for the test has led to undue emphasis on memorization at the expense of increasing student curiosity and creativity.
Yet, there is also considerable ambivalence about doing away with the concour all together. Many ordinary Iranians highly value the objectivity of the mechanical, computer generated system of test results and allocation of students to universities. For good reason they are very concerned with leaving such life-altering decisions to humans who might be susceptible to influence peddling. As in all public decisions, the benefits of the concour must be weighed against its costs. The decision to eliminate it has come after deliberations at various levels of the government, the Parliament, and the Guardian Council, which had the final say.
But my reading of the Iranian press leaves me with doubt if the extent of the public debate on this issue was matched the significance of the decision. The law anticipates using high school records instead of the result of the big test to rank students. Would these tests then be all multiple choice? Does the new law simply replace one test with many? That in itself would be desirable, but it would not solve the learning problems associated with multiple choice testing.
I hope to see in Iran in the next few years a good public discussion on not just how we go from one big test to several smaller ones but how we can promote interest in learning and skill acquisition. What sort of testing will provide incentives for better writing skills or learning history – inexplicably absent from the “big” test in recent years An informed public debate would even tackle broader questions: Why has Iran come to rely on such a centralized system of testing, which is extreme by standards of most developing countries? Have those reasons become less important over time? There is much to learn from the experience of other countries in balancing both objectivity in testing and deep, diverse content.
Another important question is the relationship between educational testing and how rewards to skills are determined in the labor market. Since better jobs are the most important reason why people seek university education, and employers must be rewarding success based on the students’ university track which is a direct outcome of their performance in the test, it is fair to ask what employers think of the decision to do away with the dreaded concour. I have not seen any commentary on this issue but I think it should be at the heart of the debate to abolish the concour.
Historically, the most desirable jobs in Iran (as in the rest of the Middle East) have been public sector jobs. In Iran, some 80 percent of college graduates work for the government. As their main employer, the government seems more keen on the type of degree they hold than what they could do on the job. Since once hired civil servants are rarely if ever laid off, information that comes after a person is hired is much less useful to the employer than what is known beforehand—that is, school ranks, test results, and diplomas. By replacing the big test with school grades, the new law does not change the nature of the information employers receive, only where it comes from.
Imagine instead a world in which employers were interested to know what a person can actually do on the job (they are called the private sector!). Ex ante signals would be much less important than productivity on the job, and demand for schools to teach skills would increase. In this case, an exam like the concour would be much less relevant, because one cumulative test would not be able to determine a student’s performance in a job that requires multiple skills (and not multiple choices).
The new guidelines for student selection should generate discussions to consider these wider issues and ensure that the new system serves well Iran’s need for creative skilled workers.
From Haideh Salehi-Esfahani on 13 December 2007, 20:15
Thank you for raising the issue and the point about the need for public discussion on what the new alternative to concour and the university degree earned in this new environment signals in terms of the employability and productivity of the university graduates.
If the returns to entrepreneurship, creativity in business, hard work and initiative have indeed increased in recent years, then the government's decision to abolish the "memorization based" concour is appropriate. But the right alternative -- an education system where the youth are challenged to develop their creative and entrepreneurial skills, conduct hands on learning, etc.-- would require a huge overhaul of the education system of Iran (over time).
For one thing, the teachers would need to be retrained to bring about new INQUIRY based methods of teaching to their classrooms. In many fields outside of pure sciences, this type of inquiry may interfere with/challenge the controlled political atmosphere of the Iranian regime.
Of course, education could evolve into a mere form of vocational training for graduates to get jobs in various "technical" areas. Interestingly, there seems to be a similar "vocational" trend in the U.S. higher education: more training so students are able to perform with specific skills than what we have long considered, "liberal education."
From Ali Dadpay on 14 December 2007, 11:00
While I agree with the author on his points regarding signaling in the labor market and how dysfunctional the actual market is in this regard and I share his sympathy for the stress and drama Iranian families go through, I would like to point out that one great function of concour has been guaranteeing a certain sort of “justice” (I apologize for the lack of a better word). As we know, and the well informed author points out, many decisions are not made based on signals of merits, qualifications or skills. Having a high score in concour guarantees the holder a seat in his or her school of choice. If a student has the sufficient test score he or she can enroll in the school of his or her choosing. Nobody could stop his/her enrollment to favor a relative or a protégé or someone who would offer a bribe.
On another note the distribution of quality of education has a very high variance at Iran’s many high schools. A centralized system has guaranteed that a low income talented teenager has the opportunity to enroll in a top university and to have some chance against a teenager from upper tail of income distribution. Eliminating concour certainly is a way to improve college selection processes, if one could guarantee an equal opportunity approach in selection and if schools have to rely on funding and employers actually care about the real things their employees can do. As long as public sector is the monopsony in this market, I fail to see how eliminating cocour in Iran would improve labor market. I am afraid that this decision would close the doors of the country’s top schools to impoverished families and open windows to opportunities for corruption in higher education.
From Hazhir Rahmandad on 14 December 2007, 17:00
Important questions. This is a fairly large problem with multiple dimensions and to have a better discussion it is helpful to have some more structure. I suggest structuring discussions on the impact of concour vs. its different alternatives on multiple objectives the policymakers care about. The basic ideas are discussed in the article and comments that have followed. Here is an initial set of objectives, please add what is missing. It is also useful to discuss the weight of these different objectives in any trade-off that eventually should be made:
1) Selection of most-qualified (qualified for what?) candidates to enter university
2) Ensure everybody has a chance to enter the university and that selection is not biased by connections etc.
3) Minimize the emotional, physical, and psychological costs of selection process
4) Provide useful information that facilitate effective selection of applicants by the labor market
5) Support the improvement of K-12 education institutions by providing clear feedback about their performance.
From Hazhir Rahmandad on 14 December 2007, 17:00
A minor question: the ISC website (http://www.sci.org.ir/portal/faces/public/sci_en/sci_en.selecteddata/sci_en.yearbookdat) offers the figure of 340,000 for the number of entrants into public schools (rather than the estimate of 130,000 offered in the article). What is the source of discrepancy?
In fact, given a similar/higher capacity in private schools, this actually may be an important issue (if rather than selecting 10%, over 70% have spots in the system as the numbers in the entering class is declining).
From Djavad Salehi-Isfahani on 15 December 2007, 15:00
Thank you, Haideh, Ali, and Hazhir for your thoughtful comments. I fully share Haideh's view that reform of the system will take years and, I would add, careful study. Whereas the decision has been taken for the moment, I hope that more discussion will open up the type of knowledge about the effect of testing that we need to have in order to make the policy change an improvement. That is never guaranteed!
I fully agree with Ali about the problems inherent in subjective student evaluation, and I acknowledged this in my post. However, bear two things in mind. Disadvantages of a policy do not mean that the policy is bad; it all depends on the alternatives (it is for a reason the economics is called the dismal science!). As with other types of policies, there are tradeoffs, and different aims must be balanced out: there are consequences to computerized testing –e.g. lack of attention to writing and other creative skills--and there are drawbacks in subjective teacher evaluations. Technology can be employed to soften the tradeoff to some extent, but more on the role of technology at a later time.
My second point in relation to Ali's comment goes to the heart of much of economic and social policy in Iran. We can protect students while in school from subjective evaluation of their (fallible or perhaps even biased) teachers, but can we do that after they graduate? If they are lucky enough to find a job, a great majority end up with an employer, whose subjective (though hopefully not arbitrary) evaluation determines their pay, promotion, and even whether the get to keep the job at all. Are we going to have worker performance evaluated by machines as well? In Iran, the labour laws limit employers’ discretion in pay and firing, but it is at some cost. The change in the law in 2003 to exempt firms with fewer than 5 workers was in response to problems with tying employer hands in this way.
In education as in employment, the tradeoff between efficiency and equity is at the heart of the discussion about policy. The choice is hard but increasingly unavoidable.
I agree with Hazhir about more structure for this discussion, and I hope that future posts will focus on some of his interesting questions in an orderly way. In the next week, I will address his question of statistics as it is important enough to deal with separately.
From Samantha Constant on 24 December 2007, 16:45
Thank you all for such an interesting discussion. In his next post (dated 21 December 2007), Djavad addresses admission statistics and policies in greater detail. Please visit his post (http://www.shababinclusion.org/content/blog/detail/758/) and read more on this topic.