Policy Design of the Unified National Examinations to Higher Education Institutions in Georgia

• Thesis title in Czech: Design jednotných přijímacích zkoušek na vysoké školy v Gruzii
• Thesis title in English: Policy Design of the Unified National Examinations to Higher Education Institutions in Georgia
• English key words: education policy, higher education system, entrance examination, Georgia, policy design, policy instruments
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2021/2022
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Public and Social Policy (23-KVSP)
• Supervisor: doc. Jan Kohoutek, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned by the advisor
• Date of registration: 17.06.2022
• Date of assignment: 17.06.2022
• Date and time of defence: 14.06.2023 09:00
• Venue of defence: Jinonice - Nový Kampus, C221, 221, seminární místnost ISS(part IMS)
• Date of electronic submission: 03.05.2023
• Date of proceeded defence: 14.06.2023
• Opponents: prof. PhDr. Arnošt Veselý, Ph.D.

Guidelines

The students’ admission process in higher educational institutions in Georgia is regulated by the particular policy. Namely, the issue is addressed by the Unified National Entrance Examination (UNEE) policy. The UNEE was launched in 2005 in order to eliminate the corruption in higher education institutions, namely in the students’ admission process. The UNEE is a unified examination process regulated by the state and everyone, who seeks to become a student in Georgia, is obliged to take and pass the UNEE (Law of Georgia on Higher Education, article 2, par, p.)
Through the historical lens, it had its own grounds why the unified national system was launched. Before the reform, the main patterns in higher education of Georgia was nepotism and favouritism (Orkodashvili, 2012). Furthermore, bribes during the admission process were very frequent (Orkodashvili, 2012). Students used to pay from $9,000 to $20,000 depending on the prestige of the faculty being entered (Orkodashvili, 2012). Therefore, establishing the Unified National Entrance Examination in 2005 was a significant first step toward combating corruption and transforming the wider education system, with significant results in a short period of time (Orkodashvili, 2012). The policy-makers created the special agency - National Assessment and Examination Center (NAEC) for coordination and control of united national entrance examination (Law of Georgia on Higher Education, Article 51). Overall, this reform 17 years ago had a great impact on corruption elimination and is evaluated as a successful education policy.
However, from a modern perspective the current system might have some challenges. The most important is that the UNEE system doesn't allow the universities to choose the student. The lack of involvement of higher education institutions in the admissions process is defined as a severe problem (Chakhaia and Bregvadze, 2018). Instead, the choice is up to the student, who makes the choices (list) of different universities/programs into the system during the registration time and after passing the exams, the system itself allocates the student to a particular university based on the exam results and student's choice.
Higher education institutions do not have the ability to pick students based on their own criteria and preferences (Chakhaia and Bregvadze, 2018). Surprisingly, there was no pushback from higher education institutions to such a dramatic infringement in their autonomy (Chakhaia and Bregvadze, 2018) This could be the effect of the government's heavy-handed approach to fighting corruption in 2005 (Chakhaia and Bregvadze, 2018).
Therefore, nowadays the system is criticized, while it does not allow the university to set any additional internal exams for students. In the beginning of the UNEE reform, the policy-makers tended to eliminate the levels of corruption in higher education and autonomy was left outside of their scope of interest, while it was not a priority (Jibladze, 2017). The limited institutional autonomy remains a challenge of the UNEE policy nowadays (Rostiashvili, 2011). It appears that the time has come to re-examine admissions procedure and allow universities a higher degree of autonomy in admission process (Chakhaia and Bregvadze, 2018).
To emphasize the scope of the policy issue, it is useful to provide some statistical data. At this moment, there are 33 universities in Georgia, 21 – teaching universities, 2 – colleges and 7 – Orthodox Theological Higher Education Institutions; in total – 63 higher education institutions (Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia, n.d.). Furthermore, according to National Statistics Office of Georgia (2022) in 2021/2022 academic year, there are in total 101 000 students in state universities, 58 000 – in private universities.
It’s worth mentioning that in terms of master programs the universities acquire some degree of autonomy. They are allowed to set the internal exams (written exams or interviews) for Master degree program students during the admission process in combination with national exams. Therefore, in terms of Master programs, the policy-makers chose the hybrid form of admission procedure.
To conclude the topic, the research problem can be defined as following: the challenges of students’ admission process in Georgia in terms of institutional autonomy of HEIs. Within the master thesis, I propose to analyze the entire UNEE policy: starting from its establishment up to its current challenges. Furthermore, the thesis will address the various reform waves/policy changes between this period. The paper will attempt to detect the necessities for redesigning the current policy and suggest the ways for sophistication of the system in the future.

References

Capano, G. (2018). Policy design spaces in reforming governance in higher education: the dynamics in Italy and the Netherlands. Higher Education, 75(4), pp. 675-694. Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26449275?seq=1
Capano, G. and Howlett, M. (2020). The Knowns and Unknowns of Policy Instrument Analysis: Policy Tools and the Current Research Agenda on Policy Mixes. SAGE, pp.1-13.
Capano, G. and Mukherjee I. (2020). Policy design and non-design: discerning the content of policy packaging, patching, stretching and layering. In Capano, G. and Howlett, M. (eds.) A Modern Guide to Public Policy. Edward Elgar Publishing. Chapter 14, pp. 204-221. Available from: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789904970/9781789904970.xml
Chakhaia L. and Bregvadze T. (2018). Georgia: Higher Education System Dynamics and Institutional Diversity, chapter 7 in Huisman, J., Smolentseva, A. and Froumin, J. (eds.). 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity. Palgrave Macmillan.
Howlett, M. (2009). Governance modes, policy regimes and operational plans: A multi-level nested model of policy instrument choice and policy design. Policy Sciences, 42(1), pp. 73–89. Available from: https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=4b3cf47a-e5ed-4fa2-8100-801f2076821a%40redis
Howlett, M. (2019). The Policy Design Primer: Choosing the Right Tools for the Job. Taylor & Francis Group. Available from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuni/detail.action?pq-origsite=primo&docID=5750596
Howlett, M. and Mukherjee I. (2018). Routledge Handbook of Policy Design. Taylor & Francis Group. Available from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuni/detail.action?pq-origsite=primo&docID=5453434
Howlett, M., Ramesh, M. and Capano, G. (2020). Policy-Makers, Policy-Takers and Policy Tools: Dealing with Behaviourial Issues in Policy Design. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 22(6), pp. 487-497. Available from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13876988.2020.1774367
Jibladze, E. (2017). Reforms for the External Legitimacy in the Post Rose Revolution Georgia: Case of University Autonomy. HERJ Hungarian Educational Research Journal 1, pp. 7-27. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=547044
Law of Georgia on Higher Education, (2004). Available from: https://matsne.gov.ge/ka/document/view/32830?publication=97
Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia, (n.d.). Authorized Higher Education Institutions. Available form: https://mes.gov.ge/content.php?id=1855&lang=geo
National statistics Office of Georgia, (2022). Number of students in higher education institutions. Available from: https://www.geostat.ge/ka/modules/categories/61/umaghlesi-ganatleba
Orkodashvili, M. (2012). The Changing Faces of Corruption in Georgian Higher Education, European Education, 44(1), pp. 27-45, DOI: 10.2753/EUE1056-4934440102
Rostiashvili, K. (2011). Higher Education in Transition, European Education, 43(4), pp. 26-44, DOI: 10.2753/EUE1056-4934430402

Preliminary scope of work

The Unified National Examination (UNE) is a policy, which regulates the students’ admission
procedure to higher education institutions in Georgia. The UNE is a special policy in terms of its
design, which manages admission procedure with a centralized and standardized approach. The
main goal of this thesis is to study the ‘side-effects’ and challenges of UNE policy, explore its
organizational structure and understand the main design patterns in the policy process to find the
optimal solutions for current challenges. The research problem is studied through policy design
conceptual framework in order to understand how a specific instrument mix was chosen by the
policy-makers and how particular redesigns of the system were made in the previous years. The
thesis discusses the design process of UNE, its design types and spaces and identifies the levels of
government capacities in this process and its impact on tool choices. The thesis highlights the
following challenges of UNE policy: contested testing model, controversial design of reforms,
‘black holes’ for corruption, inequality of access to higher education and restricted autonomy of
higher education institutions, which need to be addressed for system sophistication in the future.

Preliminary scope of work in English

The main objective of this thesis is to study the ‘side-effects’ and challenges of UNE
policy in terms of student’s admission process and its anti-corruption measures, explore its
organizational structure and processes, understand the main design patterns in the policy
process and find the optimal solutions for current challenges. Policy design as a conceptual
framework will help to study the ‘side-effects’ and challenges of UNE policy and
understand how specific instrument mix was chosen by the policy-makers and how the
particular changes were made in the system throughout these years.
Mainly, the study aims to explore concepts, such as instrument mixes, design types and
design spaces. Mixes are combinations of instruments that aim to reach particular policy
objectives in a more effective way (Howlett and Mukherjee, 2018). Design types are
packaging, patching and stretching that emphasize the role of the government in policy
design process (Capano and Mukherjee, 2020). Additionally, design spaces identify
technical and political capacities of the government in policy design and based on that
there are 4 main types of design spaces (Capano, 2018).
Hence, the main research question of this thesis is:
- How is the UNE policy designed in terms of processes, instruments choices and
policy outputs?
In order to answer the main research question, the following sub-questions will be
answered:
- What are the goals of UNE?
- How is UNE arranged in terms of organizational structure and processes?
- What are the limitations of existing UNE policy?
- What types of design are represented in the UNE policy design process?
- In which policy design spaces is the UNE policy deployed?
- Do the instrument mix of UNE promote reaching the desired policy goals?
Hence, the thesis will overview the entire UNE policy with its various system designs,
identify its goals and understand organizational structure and process, besides, explore its
main limitations and distinguish the main design types and design spaces, analyze the goals
and instrument mix and their interlinkage in UNE policy design process

To answer the proposed research questions, the thesis will use the qualitative research methodology. Namely, the desk research will be conducted to gather necessary secondary data. The thesis will analyze the current state of knowledge about the research problem and theoretical background and furthermore, will discuss the existing academic literature.
Besides, the primary data will be collected through the interviews. I propose to conduct interviews with the representatives of the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia, National Assessment and Examination Center (NAEC), several higher education institutions and field experts.

By default, the interviews will be conducted online, which also excludes the disruptions, particularly in case of re-emergence of Covid-19.

Activity Period
Gathering secondary data (research topic) October, 2022
Gathering secondary data (theoretical background) November, 2022
Accumulation of current state of knowledge / literature review December, 2022
Gathering primary data (interviews) January, 2023
Analysing data from interviews February, 2023
Drafting the thesis March-April, 2023
Finalizing the thesis May, 2023