Radical changes proposed for Romania’s national assessment: students could take exams in six subjects

Romania’s eighth-grade National Assessment could soon look very different. USR Senator Ștefan Pălărie, who chairs the Senate’s education committee, says all parties have agreed to rebuild the exam and that the reform could be completed by next summer.

Pălărie says the assessment should no longer be limited to two subjects. It should ensure fair treatment for all students, cover a wider range of disciplines, and better match students’ skills with the high-school profiles they want to pursue.

Former education ministers Mircea Miclea and Daniel Funeriu have also backed expanding the written exams. Miclea has proposed adding science, foreign languages, digital technologies, and civic and social skills to Romanian and mathematics. Funeriu supports adding science and humanities, with each high school setting the relevant coefficients.

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There is nothing new; what we are doing now is promoting ideas from people with real expertise in the field, ideas that high-school principals and teachers have been discussing for years.

But Andreia Bodea, a French teacher and principal of Bucharest’s Ion Luca Caragiale National College, says the proposals are not new. She told Adevărul that school principals and teachers have discussed similar ideas for years, and questioned why authorities are only now addressing an exam that will need to change by 2027. She said public pressure, including teachers’ complaints about a planned entrance exam, had helped revive proposals that had previously been abandoned.

Bodea also argued that expanding the National Assessment alone would not be enough. The exam should be linked to assessments carried out during grades five through eight, alongside broader reforms that politicians have overlooked. She said changing the exam had become almost self-evident, pointing to students who receive averages of 9 or 10.

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These are old ideas, and we remembered them again because teachers made a fuss in the press about this entrance exam.