The percentage of students who manages to be promoted in the first call for national tests It increased since 2000, while the qualifications they obtain in the exams of the four evaluated subjects remain stagnant or have decreased in the last 25 years.
The amount of high school graduates academic modality (Graduates of high school of regular high schools) that approved all its matters jumped from 31.31 % in 2001 to 73 % in 2025, according to official statistics.
This improvement is manifested globally, since the proportion of students of all levels that exceeded all their subjects in the first attempt rose from 58.9 % in 2001 to 79.7 % in 2025.
In contrast, the average mathematics note obtained by the schoolchildren of the general average in 2000 was 56 points, almost equal to the 57 points they achieved in 2024. In the professional technical category (graduates of Polytechnic) reached 60 points.
In the Spanish language there was a decrease from the 71 points averaged in 2000 regular high schools at 56 points of 2024.
Those data summarize the global result of the national tests After 25 years: students promote more, but they don’t learn anymore.
The only way to explain the increase in promotions with exams that continue to be reproving is uploading the notes set by schools, which provide 70 %, while the National Test adds 30 %.
“Sometimes the teacher who knows that he is not good and that he is in danger and that they can expel him from the system helps the boy in the note,” he reveals Jacqueline Malagónformer Secretary of Education and creator of the national tests In 1992.
The above raises the question of whether the standards of the education centers have lowered, as they better qualify students who, instead, prove to have learned the same or less.
In turn, student promotion despite their academic deficienciesrevives the debate about the sense of maintaining this expensive evaluation program.
The downstairs
In a simple comparison of the qualifications obtained by academic high school students in 2010 with those of 2024, a decrease of 3.2 points in the Spanish language can be found (from 54 to 56) and 5.4 points in social sciences (61.4 to 56).
In mathematics it increased 3.7 points (from 53.3 to 57) and in natural sciences of two points (from 54 to 56).
These notes remain minimally varying every year around the same average, so that the rise that is achieved at a time collapses in subsequent periods.
Measure for what?
Measuring that disappointing reality to focus educational management is precisely what justifies the need for national testsaccording to Jacqueline Malagón, his eternal defender, and the current Deputy Minister of Supervision and Control of Educational Quality, Óscar Amargós.
Bitter remembers that the original purpose is Measure performance and use that data to focus educational management according to their results.
“The evidence learning does not improve, but allow to create a Reference frame From which these processes of accompaniment and improvement and training of teachers are organized, “he says.
However, the work led by measurements has not achieved the expected progress, as he recognizes.
“He challenge It is to consolidate the improvements that are being seen, but we are not satisfied with that level reached and that is why the effort we make, which is everyone’s effort, “he says.
Malagón, on the other hand, blames the teachers and directors of the schools for not applying the recommendations that are generated and advocated to sanction the breach.
“If I were a minister again to that teacher I would take it out, because he is burning in the same question for several years and what he tells you that: that when he received from the Ministry the report of the weaknesses, he did not take them into account or ignored him”Former Secretary of Education
So what to do with the student who never manages to pass? Malagón’s response is overwhelming: “That he is burned and not enter the university, because you can’t go to a student who does not know.”
He says that his friends from the universities with whom he relates complains that the boys are arriving without being able to understand what they read and have had to create Tutorial groups to reinforce them in mathematics and Spanish language.
The Business Action Organization for Education (Educa) It also maintains that the aforementioned evaluation tool is necessary to ensure the effectiveness of teaching.
“Somehow you have to measure how the Learning in the courseif knowledge is really transmitted; And it is a tool that allows you to do it, no matter the context. That is, everyone must be measured the same, and what is the form if it is not through a test? “Says Yahaira Sosa Machado, Executive Director of Educa.
The described situation sends a equivocal message To the student himself, his family and society, as observed by the teacher and education specialist, Radhamés Mejía.
For him, the moral that is transmitted is that “advancing in the education system does not depend on really learning, but on fulfilling the promotion process.”
“The different actors seem more concentrated in their routines and immediate priorities than to face the magnitude of the problem. This indifference reveals to what extent the educational failure has normalized, and underlines the urgency of moving from silence to the Collective action“, the educator wrote in his article entitled” The Dominican educational system: between the broken mirror and the elephant in the dark. ”
The tests are unpopular and rejected by many, including the guild of already high school teachers for those who are an obstacle that they cannot overcome after up to 12 calls in four years.
Violent history
In 1997, the then Secretary of Education, Ligia Amada Melo, promised that he would eliminate the national tests In 1999, during the first government of Leonel Fernández.
The Vice President and Secretary of Education, Milagros Ortiz Bosch, intended to modify them in 2000 to cease to be a promotion prerequisite. President Hipólito Mejía said he did not like.
In 2001, the National Congress sent Ortiz Bosch a resolution in which they requested their immediate elimination.
In 1994, the mathematics exam had to be repeated in 94 private schools where the results of that exam were bought.
In that same year, the head of Education, Jacqueline Malagón denounced that only 40 % of the student population could take them due to the “strength actions” of the teachers, who would have burned roles of the tests, locked up to children in toilets so that they did not go to the classrooms and closed entrance doors to the schools.
The Dominican Association of Teachers (ADP) had refused to participate in evaluations as a pressure method to demand a salary increase and other claims.
The Frank scandalsfalsifications and frequent suspensions led to official investigations since the National Police and the National Intelligence Department (DNI) guarded the process.
More recently, the Ministry of Education confirmed that it internally evaluated the possibility of suppressing them.
Despite this turbulent story and the official intention, the national tests High school they have survived until today because, as Ligia Amada Melo later said, “all educational systems require a Control system”
“The school calendar is better fulfilled, teachers insist more in not missing classes and students put more effort to study,” he said in an interview of the newspaper last hour on October 13, 1997.
Those of the fourth and eighth grade of primary have already been eliminated, and in 2000 the national tests Practices that applied to students of the professional technical modality.
