Pearson wins national Egyptian e-assessment contract

July 22, 2019. Reproduced with permission from Pearson.

https://www.pearson.com/corporate/news/media/news-announcements/2019/07/pearson-wins-national-egyptian-assessment-contract-.html

Represents biggest global testing contract by volume for Pearson, with 125 million online assessments to be taken over four year period

LONDON: JULY 22 2019 – Pearson, the world’s learning company, today announced that it has successfully delivered the first phase of a key assessment contract supporting the Egyptian government in reforming Egypt’s national assessment programme for grades 10-12. Pearson is supporting the development, delivery and marking of 125 million online assessments over a four year period, in collaboration with York Press, the independent educational publishers.

Working with the Egyptian Ministry of Education and York Press, Pearson has successfully developed and delivered a new and innovative online assessment and marking platform rolled out nationwide. The new bespoke online assessments cover all 13 subjects of the Egyptian curriculum and are designed to gauge students’ ability in a balanced way across grades 10-12, replacing the current system that has one final, high stakes assessment in each subject at the end of Grade 12. It includes open-ended questions to focus on assessing students’ understanding before they progress to higher education and/or a career.

Dr. Tarek Shawki, the Egyptian Minister of Education, said: “Our ambition is to transform the Egyptian education system to be truly world class. We chose to partner with Pearson and York Press as they bring an incredible amount of educational knowledge and expertise, and they have demonstrated a huge amount of flexibility to successfully deliver above our expectations. We have a real sense of urgency in this reform programme and are proud to have achieved in 10 months what other countries might take several years to achieve.”

Rod Bristow, President of Core markets at Pearson, said: “Pearson is proud to have partnered with the Egyptian government in one of education’s most ambitious digital transformation projects ever undertaken. The Egyptian Ministry of Education set out a remarkably ambitious and urgent vision for higher quality assessments to support deeper learning throughout the country, and I’m delighted we were able to play our part in designing the assessment methodology, in providing the technology platform, and in a successful outcome for students and teachers.”

In advance of running the assessment series this summer, Pearson delivered a pilot in May for around 500,000 Grade 10 students taking digital assessments for each of the 13 subjects, in around 2,000 schools on Samsung tablet devices. The Egyptian Ministry of Education will continue to invest in tablets to enable Pearson to support the delivery of up to 45 million tests each year.

In addition, Pearson has also successfully delivered an online marking system to support the Egyptian Ministry of Education, enabling the marking of Grade 10 online assessments in 280 of their marking centres across the country, which 31,000 markers used in the pilot in May.

Having developed this innovative online assessment and marking platform in Egypt, Pearson is currently looking at opportunities to scale this in other education markets internationally.