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Ethics of Education: Fair Selection An Example from Kazakhstan

Nowadays, teaching and learning in many countries are oriented in acquiring competences by students to enable them to function as citizens in modern society. This orientation is often reflected in the concept ‘,Functional literacy’, which is quite popular terminology used by many researchers. The concept that was almost for the first time introduced by the developers of the PISA project. Worldwide, the modern school should prepare students (and we are intentionally trying to skip the word ‘,teach’,) to not only know things but also to be able to apply that knowledge in real-life situations.Also in Kazakhstan there is a need to prepare students for future life, not only from the perspective of the student, but also from the perspective of the nation. Nazarbayev Intellectual schools (NIS) were initiated with the aim to prepare an intellectual capacity of the nation, focusing on the representatives of the new generation who will contribute to the prosperity of the country in the (near) future. To establish this goal a new curriculum has been developed. A curriculum that meets the demands of the (future) society. The implementation of the new curriculum will start in September 2012.In order to support students and teachers in mastering the new curriculum a monitoring system will be developed, starting with mathematics . With this monitoring system students will be informed about the progress they make. Teachers will be informed whether the educational process needs adjustment to help their students and to see whether the students are still on track given the new curriculum.The development of the monitoring system takes place at NIS schools. However, it is the aim to let all common schools benefit from this developments.  ,The system will be introduces nationwide with a two year time delay. ,Implementing a new curriculum also asks for a revised selection procedure to be sure that NIS students selected will be able to master the content of the new curriculum.The current selection procedure resembles a classical post-soviet approach in selecting students: a combination of elements that remained from socialism and elements that were gained during the new era. The selection procedure needs revision in order to take new developments into consideration. Given the new curriculum, a revised selection procedure should be aimed at assessing abilities and application of knowledge in order to select the most potential students, rather than assessing knowledge. ,Examples of characteristics of the current selection procedure are: ,- assessing knowledge and not the application of knowledge,- a rather arbitrary pre-determined cut-off score, not based on (internationally accepted) standard setting methods, ,New elements in the current selection procedure are: developing tests by NIS itself and fully computer based testing, The latter makes it possible that the results will be available immediately after the test taking. Moreover, it would also make the procedure more objective and transparent because of the absence of human raters.In this paper we will focus on the development of the revised selection procedure.  ,

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