The Minister of Education speaks officially for Romanians all over the country about the reasons behind some extremely important decisions regarding the measures taken for millions of students, and all schools, he talks about the performance of students and the scholarships awarded to children.
The Minister of Education talks about the fact that during the pandemic the number of students with high grades increased extremely much, all because of the online school and the evaluation system, but separately from that he also talks about the mistake in choosing scholarships by students.
"After the first lockdown, efforts were made, I saw last year's national exams, they had reasonable, even good results for the period the students went through. Many of them made great efforts in parallel with those made in school to have these results, and we have emotions regarding the results of the national exams in 2022.
If we take notes, everything is wonderful. It is suspiciously wonderful because no matter how much we would like to, in Romania we cannot say that we have 53% of Romanian students who are geniuses, they are top students, 53%. Whether or not for the fact that in 2020, which was less of a health crisis, the number of those who were included in the top category was 123.000.
In the following year, when we went online strongly, we grew from 123.000 to 754.000, so the results are distorted. If we were to go by the results, we surpassed the USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, all at once. A less academic expression is that "we steal our own hats".
I'm trying to find the explanation, why would you want to keep a merit scholarship that last year was 100 LEI, and you don't want to apply for a scholarship, which is 150 LEI, just because it's called a merit scholarship ? 347.000 students exceeded the threshold of 9.50 on the annual average, while in 2020 only 123.000 students had an average of over 8.50.
The number of students receiving merit scholarships is almost 3 times higher than in 2020. On January 17th, the second semester begins, in the first 10 days, scholarship applications can be submitted, 100 LEI, those students who have not received the scholarship worth 100 LEI. I would like us to understand that there are 6 types of scholarships, you don't have to crowd into the merit scholarship."
