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Teachers criticized the Education Ministry’s reversal of a decision to include school exam grades in the final average of the brevet exams yesterday. The ministry had reversed the decision after it “learned that some public and private schools handled the issue irresponsibly,” a spokesperson for Education Minister Abbas Halabi told L’Orient Today. Brevet students — those who take state exams to receive diplomas certifying their completion of middle school — were finally able to take their exams in late June after more than two years of COVID-19-related interruptions. To ease the examination procedure, some mitigating measures were put in place by the Education Ministry, one of which was to calculate school test results along with the results of official exams to potentially boost success rates. However, the decision was reversed after “some schools took advantage of this and forged their students’ grades … to improve [the school’s] success rates,” the ministry’s spokesperson told L’Orient Today. In a statement, teachers accused the Education Ministry of having lost its credibility because “the success rate exceeded 90 percent and the rate of those who earned distinctions was above 70 percent [before] the minister decided to cancel the calculation of school grades [which brought] the success rate down to 79 percent, and those who earned distinctions to 47 percent.”