Issue 234: Logging into Merit

Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education faced sharp parliamentary scrutiny last week over its plan to administer the upcoming university entrance exam entirely online, with roughly 700,000 students expected to sit the test within the next few months. Lawmakers questioned whether the state possesses the infrastructure and institutional readiness for a transition of this scale, citing unreliable electricity, weak internet connectivity, and limited access to computers as obvious risks to exam integrity and student performance.

The proposed digital shift arrives at a moment when Ethiopia’s exam system is already operating under severe strain. University entrance results have been dismal for several consecutive years: pass rates fell to 3.3% in 2021/22 and 3.2% in 2022/23, before recovering only modestly to 5.4% in 2023/24. In 2022/23, 1,328 secondary schools reportedly failed to produce a single passing student; in 2023/24, 1,363 schools had no student pass at all. Millions of students attend school in conflict-ridden areas, with limited school supplies, delayed book deliveries, and, as demonstrated by the Ministry itself, incompetent teachers.

In other words, the state is not digitizing a well-functioning system so much as attempting to re-engineer one whose legitimacy is already in question.

To be sure, the logic behind online testing is not difficult to discern. A digital exam can, in principle, reduce leakage, tighten administration, standardize delivery, and move the Ministry away from the costly and cumbersome practice of transporting students to university campuses for high-stakes exams. The government has plainly been preparing the ground: the Ministry’s Grade 12 exam platform now includes online training, model exams, final exam schedules, and tutorial materials, while officials have framed exam digitization as part of the broader Digital Ethiopia agenda.

The difficulty is that digitization is not synonymous with readiness. Ethiopia’s digital infrastructure remains far thinner than the Ministry’s ambitions imply. The World Bank says internet access in Ethiopia rose from 15% to 19% of the population between 2020 and 2024, while UNESCO’s 2025 internet assessment says 79% of Ethiopians remain unconnected and only 25% are regular internet users, with rural disparities and low digital literacy still prominent constraints. Even the Ministry’s own claims of progress, nearly 200,000 students and over 12,000 academic staff reached through digital-skills initiatives, look substantial only until set against a national candidate pool that now runs into the hundreds of thousands.

That gap matters because an online entrance exam does not merely test academic preparedness; under current conditions, it also risks testing access to electricity, bandwidth, devices, familiarity with interfaces, and the ability to navigate technical glitches under pressure. Parliamentarians' skepticism, then, is not simply procedural conservatism. It reflects a more substantive concern: that the Ministry may end up converting structural inequality into individual failure, and then recording the result as meritocratic assessment.

There is also a suggestive inconsistency in the rollout narrative itself. The current controversy centers on an entirely online exam for roughly 700,000 students, yet the Ministry’s own Grade 12 exam portal carried a ministerial update in April 2025 indicating preparations for 150,000 students to sit online exams, up from 29,000 the previous year. That does not necessarily invalidate the latest plan, but it does imply that the scale and speed of implementation have moved faster than the publicly documented progression. For a reform this sensitive, such slippage between phased preparation and full-scale ambition is unlikely to reassure families.

More broadly, the issue is not whether Ethiopia should digitize its examination system. It almost certainly will have to. The question is whether the state is choosing to digitalize at the point where its administrative capacity is still too uneven to absorb failure gracefully. In a high-stakes exam system already associated with vanishingly low pass rates, the absence of credible contingency measures, robust technical support, and transparent redress mechanisms could turn an education reform into a legitimacy crisis. A paper exam can be badly designed and still be completed; an online exam, if badly implemented, can fail before knowledge is ever meaningfully tested. Last year’s remedial exams were a source of sorrow for thousands of students who campaigned for nearly a year about their troubles during the examination. 

The Ministry’s immediate challenge is less technological than institutional: it will need to demonstrate not merely that an online platform exists, but that it can withstand nationwide stress. The more credible path may be a phased or hybrid rollout, especially given that official exam materials already point to training windows, model exams, and staged preparation rather than an effortlessly settled transition. What merits close watching now are the Ministry’s contingency protocols for outages and disruptions, the extent of device and connectivity provision across regions, and whether students who are disadvantaged by technical failure will have any meaningful appeals or remediation mechanisms. Absent that, the online exam risks becoming a revealing test of state capacity, one in which students bear the consequences of institutional overconfidence.

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