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Case Study

Photo: World Learning/ Lazar Dimitrijev

A forth-year high school student checks his graduation exam results online

“The portal gave us and the students a unique graduation exam space where we could share information, news, concerns and experiences very fast… we can communicate with the candidates, the schools and other stakeholders,” said Katica Spasovska Binceva of the Bureau for Development of Education.

Challenge

After major reforms were made in the Macedonian education system, the Macedonian Bureau for Development of Education (BDE) was responsible for establishing a new State Matura (graduation exam) that would be given to all Macedonian high school graduates. Before the exam was given for the fi rst time, the BDE task force visited every high school across the country presenting the new high school graduation concept, developed brochures and reserved a portion of the BDE Web site for information on the exam. However, it quickly became apparent to BDE management that there was a need to create a Web portal dedicated solely to graduation exams, where students could get important exam information and check their results online.

Initiative

The Macedonian Bureau for Development of Education is a target organization of a USAID program aimed at human and institutional development. The USAID program determined that the BDE needed serious IT infrastructure improvement to best serve Macedonian students and the development of the graduation exam web portal was one of the priority projects. The result of the USAID-funded project is a dynamic, secure, fourlanguage Web portal that allows students easy online access to their graduation exam information while protecting the sensitive personal information of each student.

Results

The first year the portal existed and before there was any promotion for it, there were 10,174 hits (out of nearly 18,000 registered students) on the day the graduation exam results were published. The portal provided students with the opportunity to check their results from home by entering their first and last name and their unique identifi cation number. The large number of visits, and more than 2,000 questions submitted to the BDE team, proved that the students needed the tool, which fi ts their Internet-oriented life style. Now, information about the portal is provided in every BDE presentation. Materials advise all schools and students about external and internal graduation exams, including successful answer samples that are available on the portal.

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