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High Number of Suicides During University Entrance Exam Season

January 5, 2021
OstanWire
1 min read
High Number of Suicides During University Entrance Exam Season

The suicide rate among Iran’s student population is on the rise, a former education official has revealed, reporting that dozens of students who failed university entrance exams had taken their own lives in recent years.

"In past years, we had news of the suicide of dozens of university entrance exam candidates ... due to failure, repression, and humiliation in the family," former education minister Mohammad Batahi said during a meeting to assess Iran’s educational exam system on Monday, January 4. He said officials had been informed of the tragic deaths in what he described as “secret bulletins.”

Batahi criticized the Islamic Republic’s current use of entrance exams to determine whether a student attends university, adding that some candidates suffer psychological damage after failing exams and that this can have a knock-on, detrimental impact on their futures.

“At the moment, the method of entry could be changed for about 80 to 90 percent of university courses, but for the remaining 10 to 20 percent, we accept that we have no choice but to use the current method," he said.

Batahi also raised the issue of lack of diversity in the country’s schools, blaming entrance exam system for this problem too. "You will not find any country that classifies children as we do," Batahi said.

The former educational minister added that those who benefit financially from the exams through teaching and support courses enjoy a turnover of billions of tomans and are unwilling to give up this income.

Batahi had previously estimated the revenue generated by entrance exams in Iran at 15,000 trillion tomans.

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