At least secondary school pupils can now use the Internet to apply for university places. Apart from that, writes Shaden Shehab, nothing has changed The public increasingly views educational reform as a lost cause. Year after year and government after government promises have been made for a comprehensive revamp of the educational system and yet the situation worsens. The curriculum remains Byzantine in its complexity. Fifteen million students are crammed into 38,000 schools. Classroom size can exceed 60, and teacher training is lax. The result is that many pupils leave school hardly able to read and write. For those who do survive the system, the one bright spot is that the 350,000 graduates of the Thanaweya Amma exams can now apply for university places over the Internet. Egypt may be unique in that further education, and beyond that employment, prospects are wholly dependent on the pupils' performance in examinations, in a minimum of ten courses, taken during the last two years of secondary schooling. But at least they will no longer have to queue at the Maktab Al-Tansiq, the Enrollment Coordination Office. For decades this Cairo office has been the scene of snaking lines of students, clutching application forms listing their choice between 48 universities in order of preference. They would then have to undergo a nerve wracking wait for a reply, sent through the post by the Ministry of Higher Education once the applications had been assessed. This year, students can apply to universities via the Internet. Thanaweya Amma graduates have been divided into three groups according to their marks. A week has been set aside during which each group can register online and fill in his or her application. Each pupil has an allocated number which must be entered before the application form, already filled in with the student's name, gender and final examination results, appears on screen. The first group, comprising the 136,000 pupils who scored the highest marks, began the process on 21 July. And while some feedback has been positive, teething problems were inevitable. "At last something positive has happened. The designated site is user friendly and even explains our options," says Rania Nehad. The new system, echoes Amir Suleiman, "is something of which we can be proud". The greatest -- and most obvious -- obstacle to its implementation is the limited number of students who have access to computers at home. The Ministry of Higher Education, in an attempt to facilitate the process, has made more than 4,000 computers in universities across Egypt's governorates accessible to pupils. Others have used Internet cafes to fill in the forms. Some 2,000 students, though, were dismayed to discover that after keying in their code numbers the details included on the form were incorrect. They have been promised that their names and gender will be corrected as soon as possible. Other problems involved computers crashing, slow connections, and pupils who are computer illiterate taking hours to fill in the form. Results in this year's Thanaweya Amma have been so high that pupils scoring less than 98 per cent overall are likely to face problems joining the most coveted faculties, which include medicine and pharmacology, political science and economics and mass communication. The limited number of places mean that students with lower grades are unlikely to get a look in. Indeed, the 70,000 students who obtained 70 per cent or less will have no place at university, and instead will have to apply to the less prestigious institutes. Out of this year's examinees, 1,661 students scored 100 per cent in their exams, a phenomenon education experts have yet to explain. Students with adequate means can, of course, escape the whole dilemma by applying to private universities, where fees begin at LE25,000 a year. Although they are wholly private institutions in 2005 the Ministry of Higher Education set minimum entry requirements: students seeking to enrol in science subjects at private universities will need at to have an overall score of at least 80 per cent, those seeking places on humanities courses 65 per cent or more.
