Japanese Kids Take National Achievement Test Partly on Computers

   Tokyo, April 17 (Jiji Press)--Elementary school sixth graders and junior high school third graders across Japan took the education ministry's annual national achievement test Thursday, and the junior high schoolers' science test was conducted in a computer-based format from Monday.
   The fiscal 2025 test covered the Japanese language, mathematics and science, and was taken by some two million students from around 28,000 schools.
   The results of the test will be released in July, while by-prefecture data will be available in August or later. Reflecting criticisms that releasing information such as prefectural averages of correct answers would lead to excessive competition and people ranking regions, data will be released in a way that emphasizes distribution, to enable analyses from multiple aspects.
   Computer-based testing, used in science tests for junior high third graders, or ninth graders aged 14-15, was done with a device distributed to each student. It enables questions to be given using videos and allows test content to be differentiated by taker.
   In this year's test, students were shown a video of the changing color of flames from burning magnesium and were asked to answer the chemical change that occurred by moving diagrams on the screen. The education ministry plans to conduct tests on all subjects using the computer-based format from fiscal 2027, scrapping the current format of written tests.

(2025/04/17-18:56)

To read a full story, please click here to find out how to subscribe.