The Ministry of Higher Education recently decided to add admission tests to the faculties of media, literature and in the sectors of Arabic, English and French.

This was aimed at improving the methods of evaluating student's suitability to their chosen courses. In addition, the new measures give universities the chance to discover and foster the more talented students while simultaneously having the negative effect of turning away many students who, at such a young age, may not be entirely sure of which career path they wish to undertake.

This seemingly harsh choice may be to accommodate the declining resources and growing student numbers which universities in Syria are suffering from.

The dominating opinion in Syria is that this decision came to replace the old mechanism of the Baccalaureate test.

The problem lies in the fact that this test is a misleading guideline as it permits students to embark on career paths and courses for which they may not have a passion. Moreover, this new regulation failed to include important faculties such as political science, medicine and economics. This can have the detrimental effect of burdening these sectors with unmotivated employees and weakening the vocational process in general, because the benefits of a doctor's salary outweigh the commitment required to pass the admissions test in a field like media.

It is evident that the new admission tests have done little to change the incentives for young students to work in a field they enjoy and still attract them to the higher paid jobs such as in medicine.

Nonetheless, it seems that the current tests might be precursors to a more widely encompassing policy which would see admission tests in all fields and help solve the problems of the untrained and incompetent new graduates in our workforce.

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