Uncategorized – National Assessment and Examinations Center

Special Report 2022

This is a special year for the National Assessment and Examinations Center as the organization celebrates its 20th anniversary.

For every employee of the Center, this date is memorable, important and meaningful. Despite many obstacles, during its 20 years, the Center was able to initiate one of the most successful reforms in the field of education in Georgia – the Unified National Examinations.
Throughout the years the NAEC has managed to further develop the testing and assessment system and retain the public trust that is really valuable for us.
In this Special Report, we will share what has been achieved during the twenty-year history of the Center, what the challenges associated with the introduction of the first centralized high-stakes examinations were and how the public responded to the reform.

Apart from the introduction of centralized exams in 2005, the other biggest challenge has been holding examinations during the two years of the Coronavirus Pandemic. During the high peaks of Covid-19, our organization proved once again that with the tireless work of our professional team it is possible to achieve the goals even in such arduous circumstances.

In this report, readers will also learn how the exam process is prepared every year and what changed from one year to another.

The Special Report 2022 can be downloaded from here Download

Call for Local IT Consultant to support NAEC

UNDP/Governance Reform Fund announces call for Local IT Consultant to support LEPL the National Assessment and Examinations Centre (NAEC) in ICT Infrastructure and software Architecture. Details can be found here.

Location :	Tbilisi, GEORGIA
Application Deadline :	here.
	Details can be found here.
Additional Category :	Democratic Governance and Peacebuilding
Type of Contract :	Individual Contract
Post Level :	National Consultant
Languages Required :	English
Expected Duration of Assignment :	Up to 60 working days within period of August-December 2021

Details can be found here.

Continue to Study in Georgia

The National Assessment and Examinations Center supports Georgian citizens’ endeavors to continue studying in Georgia. Therefore, each year the Center opens call for applicants who are willing to transfer from foreign universities to Georgian higher educational institutions.

This year the registration started from the 20^th of February and will be open until the 5^th of February 18:00pm.

Eligible candidates should be citizens of Georgia who have studied / are studying and have received credits / qualifications at a higher education institution recognized by law in a foreign country (they have been abroad for a period of study, not less than 75 days per semester).

Detailed information regarding registration procedures can be found here.

Please click for the test sample.

Application form can be downloaded from here.

NAEC in 3rd FLIP+ annual online event, 11th – 12th June 2020

About FLIP+ e-assessment community

The FLIP+ e-assessment community was officially launched as a non-profit association in June 2019.

It grew from first conversations dating back to January 2017 between the official education assessment bodies from four countries (France-Luxembourg-Italy-Portugal: hence the acronym) who were seeking solutions to common challenges in e-assessment. The assessment center (CAEd) from Brazil joined this initial group in 2018, and ever since several other institutions and bodies from many countries have expressed their interest in the initiative. Georgia Joined in 2019.

NAEC became the member of international FLIP+ E-assessment Community in 2019 to discuss and share challenges and success stories of e-assessment project. As a community member, NAEC can share the experiences in e-assessment content development, as well as in TAO open source development by composing extensions for the platform (e.g. portable computer interaction for the development of different interactive technology-enhanced items, reporting features for the platform, offline version for test delivery and etc.). NAEC can work on certain extensions for the platform in cooperation with other countries, thus sharing the budget for the development, or exchange already developed extensions free of charge.

3rd FLIP+ annual online event, 11th – 12th June 2020 (Link)

During its third international FLIP+ online event , the FLIP+ association gathered over 100 participants from 50 different institutions working in the field of educational assessment. Participants joined in from 24 countries as well as from IEA and OECD.

Under the FLIP+ motto of “sharing”, participants were able to learn about the e-assessment experiences of countries like Denmark, Georgia, Lithuania and Norway and gain insights about developments in six other FLIP+ member institutions. Work undertaken this year related to the FLIP+ Item Library was also presented. It should be recalled that the first ideas to set up the item library were initially discussed during the 2019 annual event in Rome. A year later, participants greatly welcomed the live demo of the initial prototype of the Item Library platform which showed where the items would be stored, how they could be accessed, reviewed, worked upon and shared.

Publication about NAEC presentation on the 3rd FLIP+ annual online event, 11th – 12th June 2020 (Link)

Georgia: Assessment for Development (Link)

Project : Assessment for Development

The Government of Georgia in June 2019 has signed Loan Agreement for financing the implementation of Innovation, Inclusion and Quality Project (I2Q Project) with the World Bank[1]. The Project development objectives are to (i) expand access to preschool education; and (ii) improve the quality of education and the learning environments.

Project – Assessment for the Development is under I2Q project component 2, Subcomponent 2.4 – Development of a National Assessment Framework. It aims to implement census-based e-assessment (fully online mode) for the public schools of Georgia. The goal of assessment is to measure students’ achievements towards the national curriculum and track their progress. About 150 000 students of 4th, 6th and 10th grades will be assessed in literacy and numeracy every year. Students, their teachers, parents, corresponding schools and educational authorities will receive the automated e-reports on the assessment results, in order to support data-driven decision-making processes on individual, classroom, school and national level.

The initial phase of the project has already started in 2019 and draft framework for the assessment has been elaborated, as well as e-tests in literacy and numeracy for 4^th and 6^th grades. Two pilot phases have been planned for 2020 in order to try-out the content of the tests, to trial the platform and develop business processes for the e-assessment.

NAEC already has hired the staff, exclusively for the Assessment for Development project: project manager, project assistant, TAO administrators, system administrator, developer, literacy and numeracy experts.

The first pilot took place in February 2020. 6 000 students from 59 schools participated in the pilot in order to try-out the items and online delivery platform.

The items were created and assembled in the tests:

5 tests for the numeracy in 6^th grade. Each test comprised 20 items. The items were developed based on the national curriculum of the 6^th grade math;
4 tests were developed for the 4^th grade numeracy, with 25 items each. The items were developed based on the national curriculum of the 4^th grade math.
10 texts, with 14 items in each, were developed to test literacy skills in the 4^th grade.
10 texts were developed to assess 6^th grade literacy skills, each text included 8-9 items to assess reading and writing skills for the 6^th grade, as defined by the national curriculum of Georgian language and literature.

Students’ responses were analyzed and the items were edited based on the psychometric analysis. The set of the tests were assembled for the second phase of the pilot.

Project team analyzed existing test authoring and delivery platforms and selected OAT (Open Assessment Technologies) TAOTesting open Source eassesement software (TAO). TAO platform enables to create technology-enhanced items (TEIs) and ensures complete content interoperability. It offers: item authoring, test creation, scheduling and delivering tests online on a nation-wide scale, managing test-takers and user access, collecting and saving students responses, automatically grading candidates closed-question responses and exporting the data for further use.

Community edition of TAO platform is installed on the local Education Management Information System (EMIS) servers. EMIS and NAEC provide the hosting and delivery services for the platform.

Version 1.0 of e-reporting and e-scoring modules have been developed and integrated with TAOtesting platform. E-reporting module generates the reports for student, teacher and school based on the data collected from the student responses. E-scoring module enables the human scorer to score the student responses collected from TAO testing platform. Both modules are ready for the trial in the 2^nd pilot of the project.

The second pilot is planned in autumn 2020, involving 300 public schools of Georgia. It aims to try-out the tests (instead of trying-out the items in the first pilot), to test human scoring and e-reporting system and its compliance with Tao platform.

[1] (Link)