Five years of successive changes to Jordan's General Secondary Education Certificate exam have ended not with the removal of the Tawjihi, but with a legal decision to divide its functions.
اضافة اعلان
The Education and Human Resources Development Law No. 13 of 2026, approved by Royal Decree and published in the Official Gazette on May 14, defines the General Secondary Education Certificate as the document awarded to students who successfully complete grade 12. It defines the General Examination separately, as the exam the Ministry administers for the purpose of admission to higher education institutions. The law took effect 90 days after publication.
The distinction is not administrative housekeeping. Under the previous arrangement, a single exam certified completion of school, ranked students, opened the gate to university, and served as an informal audit of schools, teachers and curricula. Jordan has now moved to a two-part model: a school certificate that confirms a student finished secondary education, and a national exam that determines whether the results can be used to compete for a university place.
That concentration of purposes in one sitting explains much of the social weight the exam carried. Families have long described it in the language of an ordeal rather than an assessment.
A reform that began in 2021
The Ministry's National Framework for Student Assessment in Jordan 2024 records that the Tawjihi has been modified repeatedly across its history, including changes to the number of sittings, the number of subjects, and the distribution of marks.
A committee formed in 2021 to develop the exam set the direction. It concluded that the exam should continue, but with a different philosophy and different construction methods. Among its recommendations: fewer subjects, shorter papers, greater flexibility in examination dates, higher-quality question banks, more equitable assessment tools, and attention to the psychological and social effects on students and families.
The committee also proposed spreading the exam across two years and feeding school assessment data into university admissions. Its starting point was redefinition, not abolition.
In 2022, the Ministry cut the load from ten subjects to eight, seven of which counted toward the final average, while keeping the single-sitting format. The change gave students room to choose subjects matching their interests and eased some of the pressure. It did not alter the exam's position at the centre of the system. Students still studied for the paper, teachers still paced their lessons to it, schools were still judged by their results, and families still treated private lessons and online platforms as a direct investment in a grade.
The 2023 decision went further, extending the exam across two years from the 2024/2025 academic year. Students would sit common general subjects in grade 11 and specialised subjects in grade 12, within two tracks, academic and vocational, alongside curriculum development and the introduction of the BTEC system.
The shift reached beyond students. Teachers accustomed to a stable format faced new fields, redistributed material, and questions weighted toward understanding, application and analysis rather than recall. Complaints followed.
The parliamentary education committee reviewed student feedback on the 2023 physics, chemistry and mathematics papers, including question formats, corrections issued during the exam itself, and the confusion that resulted.
The underlying constraint surfaced in those discussions. An exam cannot change faster than the teaching behind it. Where papers begin measuring higher-order skills while classrooms still run on explanation and memorisation, students look outside school for help, through tutors, platforms, study guides and question banks. Reform did not shrink the private tutoring market. It reorganised it.
Equity moved to the centre
The new structure also asks more of schools: steering students toward a suitable field, building cumulative learning, tracking performance, and connecting common subjects to later specialisation. That raised a question the old model largely avoided. Do all schools have comparable laboratories, resources and qualified teachers? A student in a public school far from Amman does not necessarily choose from the same menu as a student in a well-resourced private school.
The 2024 results showed a system operating in two modes at once. The overall pass rate reached roughly 63.1 per cent among more than 171,000 candidates, according to Ministry figures published at the time.
The same year brought protests over marking, grade inflation, and the additional marks allocated to teachers' children, which shifted public argument from the difficulty of the exam to the fairness of the machinery around it.
The first cohort under the two-year model, students born in 2008, sat the opening part of the national exam in grade 11, worth 30 per cent of the final mark, with the remaining 70 per cent carried by grade 12. The overall pass rate for that first part came in at close to 70 per cent in the 2025 results.
No student had a full future riding on one year. The pressure, however, did not disappear. It stretched across two years, and so did the cost of tutoring, guides and practice papers, which turns educational equity into an economic question.
What the new law does not settle
Minister of Education and Human Resources Development Azmi Mahafza has since clarified how the sequence works. Students who complete grade 11 may sit the first part of the national exam, covering Arabic, mathematics, Islamic education and Jordanian history, which together carry 30 per cent of the final mark.
Grade 12 concentrates on subjects tied to a student's chosen field and intended university major. Mahafza confirmed that students may defer the first part to grade 12 rather than taking it immediately.
The Ministry has also stated that the Tawjihi in its former shape has ended, that the General Examination now serves university admission alone, and that secondary education runs across three years, grades 10, 11 and 12. It emphasised that this does not extend the national exam to three years.
In January 2026, the Education and Human Resources Council approved further curriculum amendments: greater specialisation of fields, English as a compulsory examined subject across all fields, and mathematics added to the ministerial subjects alongside Arabic, Islamic education and Jordanian history. The curriculum was reorganised to align more closely with scientific and humanities pathways.
That leaves a reform still being reformed. Education systems evolve, but students and teachers experience mid-course rule changes as instability. King Abdullah II stressed in 2023 that any overhaul must align outcomes with the unified university admission system and be explained to students and families before implementation.
The deeper point is that renaming the exam does not redistribute the pressure. If places in competitive majors remain scarce and selection still turns on a score, demand for tutoring and platforms will persist, and the question will simply move from whether a student passed to whether the mark is high enough. Success will not be measured by pass rates in the General Examination. It will be measured by whether access to higher education has become fairer and better matched to what students can actually do.
The clearest lesson of the past five years is that exam reform cannot outrun curriculum reform. The Ministry has tied the two together, and the new study plan rests on common and specialised subjects chosen according to a student's interests. Delivering it requires curricula that are less loaded with information, clearer in their objectives, teachable in the time available, and connected to university skills and the labour market, supported by practical teacher training.
A sophisticated question bank achieves little if training stays the same, and multiple fields of study mean little if schools cannot teach each of them well.
If the separation between certificate and entrance exam is completed, curricula are rebuilt, teaching methods change, assessment becomes multi-layered, and admissions are redesigned for transparency, what began in 2021 may prove the most significant shift in the philosophy of Jordanian secondary education in decades.
By Mahmoud Tarawneh, Al-Ghad.
