The Ministry of Education set on Thursday, May 14 the date to give the students of the second phase of the secondary school final exam their individual passwords. They will then be able, on May 16, to log on to the Ministry's website and find out the classroom in which they will take the exam as well as the new subjects in which they will be tested. Dr. Reza Abou Sarie, Assistant Minister of Education and President of the General Secondary School Examinations, told Al-Masry Al-Youm that the "interim year" would help allot more time to correcting the exams. He expected this year's corrections to last less than last year due to the drop in the number of first-phase students from 390,637 to 37, 185.
He added there would be 4 departments nationwide devoted to the correction of the exams (in brackets the governorates they will cover): Cairo (Cairo, Giza, Helwan, October 6, Qalyubia, Menoufia, the Red Sea, Fayoum and Beni Suef), Alexandria (Alexandria, Matrouh, Beheira, Kafr el-Sheikh and Gharbia), Mansoura (Dakahlia, Damietta, Sharkia, Port Said, Suez, Ismailia, North Sinai and South Sinai), and Assiut (Menya, Assiut, Sohag, Qena, Luxor, Aswan and New Valley). Meanwhile, Zaghloul Abdel Maqsoud, Under Secretary of the Ministry of Education and head of the Secretariat General, said: "We're ready to disburse the second phase allowance for the teachers who applied for the second phase exams in April and May 2009", stressing that the ministry has chosen the venues for the tests at the universities. Speaking to Al-Masry Al-Youm, Zaghloul said the allowance would be received after the Directorates of Education received the results of the tests and submitted them to the Governors. They will then be approved and a decree will be issued assigning those teachers to their new posts. For its part, the Ministry of Education has posted on its website (http://services.moe.gov.eg) the venues of the exams at the Egyptian universities and announced that the teachers would be informed of those venues on time. The teachers who have applied for this month's tests are 143,000. According to the Education Minister's instructions, the teachers who failed to enter the previous tests can take the one next August. The categories allowed to take these tests are those taking a second round of exams or those who have not performed in previous tests or have been unable to take May's exams.
