G.E.D. success rate: more than 27 points gained in 10 years

TEN years ago, just over half of all A-level (General Education Degree) candidates in Morocco passed. In 2014, the pass rate at the end of the two sessions of the national exam was just 53.11%. Since then, it has risen steadily, year after year, despite the turbulence faced by public schools (ongoing teacher strikes between 2017 and 2024, the Covid crisis of 2020, and other circumstances). Between 2015 and 2025, the percentage of students passing this passage gained 27.65 points.
Indeed, this year 2025 the G.E.D. pass rate was 83.3%, the second-best score recorded over the last ten years, after that of 2024 (84.1%), compared with a pass percentage of only 55.65% in 2015. How can we read this performance, given that all international surveys assessing the level of Moroccan pupils, whether in reading, comprehension or science, reveal weak skills, despite the improvements recorded. The latest reform, that of pioneering schools and the TaRL (Teach at the right level) method, to which the Ministry of Education attributes “exceptional” results, was launched barely two years ago.
Is this a real improvement in the level of G.E.D. candidates – which would be surprising, given the low level of pupils (at the end of 2022, the Ministry of Education claimed that 70% of primary school pupils had not mastered the basic skills of their school cycle) – or rather a “selection” effect? In other words, in the final year of the G.E.D., only those students who have been able to hang in there, those with a good enough level to pass the exams, are retained. The others are lost along the way, hence the high pass rate. In fact, if we compare the number of pupils entering the first year of primary school with those enrolled in the second year of the G.E.D. exam, we can see a considerable difference.

Nearly 70% of students lost

Let’s take the number of pupils in the first year of primary school in 2012-2013. This cohort is expected to reach the final year of junior high school in 2023-2024. According to Ministry of Education statistics, between these two dates, the number of pupils dropped from 591,101 to just 183,446. This represents a wastage of almost 70%, including repeaters who joined the 2012-2013 cohort on their way to the final year of the Junior High School Degree (G.E.D.).
However, the “ selection ” argument doesn’t seem to hold water, since the phenomenon has been going on for decades and has not improved G.E.D. results all the same. 
For some experts, the “feats” achieved by the G.E.D. students in recent years have not been sufficient to improve results.
For some experts, the “ feats ” of the G.E.D. students in recent years should rather be attributed to the level of the exams, and point to a “ superficial inflation of the pass rate ”. In other words, the degree of difficulty of the final exam has been “  eased ” to match the actual level of the students taking it, and thus maximize the pass rate. Only the Ministry of Education can confirm or deny this point of view. 

Ahlam NAZIH