Nigar İsmayilova

Standardized National Entrance exams for universities limit the development of Azeri students’ higher-order thinking skills. Most people agree that the testing system for university entrance, brought a fair, transparent assessment and meritocracy to our education system, as, before this policy implementation, there was a high level of corruption in the admission system to higher education. Jacques Hallak mentions Azerbaijan’s this policy as a successful measure of reducing fraud in entrance examinations. (Hallak, 2007, p.7) However, it has big advantages by overcoming corruption, side effects of standardized tests are also unavoidable.  However, the new curriculum has a constructivist approach, lessons are mostly teacher-centered and focused on memorization, as the entrance exam tests mostly contain lower-order thinking skills, such as memorization and calculation . As a result, we could see gaps in the skills of our students and students of higher developed countries .  ...

  Introduction One of the most problematic issues in Azerbaijan is underemployment of graduate students, which stems from several reasons such as lose connection and cooperation between higher education and labor market, low involvement of labor market representatives in higher education curriculum development and skill mismatch of graduate students. In Azerbaijan, many university students lack a clear understanding of job requirements, how to acquire the necessary skills and certificates, where to look for relevant jobs and internships, and how to network with potential employers. They often receive inadequate guidance from mentors, advisors, or professors in their institutions. Although some students attend career expos to explore potential opportunities, these events are not organized systematically and often yield few tangible results. Good-quality retraining and upskilling opportunities are relatively scarce. The Minister of Education and Science, Emin Amrullayev said at t...