State Final Assessment
In 2018, the Educational Assessment Strategy for general secondary education until 2030 was developed. Researchers and practitioners agree that Ukraine needs to introduce standardized final assessments for students completing each level of general secondary education: primary school, basic secondary education, and specialized secondary education. It is important to obtain objective data on the state of education every year and to use this information to improve the quality of education and educational activities.
The Educational Assessment Strategy provides for conducting the SFA at key stages of education: for fourth-graders, ninth-graders, and twelfth-grade graduates.
The main goal of the SFA is to help children move forward in their studies with confidence, rather than simply to assess their academic achievements or compare their results with those set out in the State Standard of Primary Education / the State Standard of Basic Secondary Education.
In 2018, the Educational Assessment Strategy for general secondary education until 2030 was developed. Researchers and practitioners agree that Ukraine needs to introduce standardized final assessments for students completing each level of general secondary education: primary school, basic secondary education, and specialized secondary education. It is important to obtain objective data on the state of education every year and to use this information to improve the quality of education and educational activities.
The Educational Assessment Strategy provides for conducting the SFA at key stages of education: for fourth-graders, ninth-graders, and twelfth-grade graduates.
The main goal of the SFA is to help children move forward in their studies with confidence, rather than simply to assess their academic achievements or compare their results with those set out in the State Standard of Primary Education / the State Standard of Basic Secondary Education.
In 2024 and 2025, the SFA was piloted in Grade 4. Each stage involved up to 2,000 children from interested schools in various regions of the country. The aim was to test the assessment tools and accompanying procedures.
In spring 2026, the third stage of piloting the SFA at the primary school level took place. It involved 10,000 fourth-graders from various regions of Ukraine and different types of schools. Its main aim was, first and foremost, to test the procedures for collecting assessment results through a special educational platform (hereinafter, the SEP), which is currently being developed by IT specialists.
As part of the SFA-4, assessments in mathematics and in the Ukrainian language and reading will be conducted. To administer the assessment at school, the UCEQA will provide layouts of test booklets for the relevant subjects.
The SFA tasks will be distinctly competency-based, thus reflecting the essence of the State Standard of Primary Education.
The Ukrainian language and reading tasks will focus on engaging texts. Students will be able to show how well they understand what they have read and whether they can write a short message of their own that is well structured and grammatically correct. In addition, students will be offered listening and speaking tasks. These will relate to a variety of real-life situations.
Similarly, the mathematics tasks will ask students to demonstrate their mathematical skills by reasoning about typical everyday situations, such as buying goods or groceries, preparing meals, measuring objects, predicting outcomes, etc.
The SFA-4 will be conducted solely for the purpose of monitoring learning achievements. Students will receive scores showing which tasks they completed correctly and where they made mistakes. However, these scores will be for informational purposes only. That is, the assessment results will not determine whether a child is promoted to the next grade. Instead, they will be used so that the children themselves, their parents, and teachers can find out which topics have already been mastered well and which still need more work, so that students can study more confidently in Grade 5.
All fourth-graders will take the SFA in their own schools, in their own classrooms, with their own teacher. Students will work in the familiar paper-based format, while the computer environment will be used for exchanging materials between the UCEQA and educational institutions.
The updated SFA format for Grade 9 will be conducted to obtain objective information about the quality of basic secondary education, to determine whether the learning outcomes of gymnasium graduates meet the requirements of the State Standard of Basic Secondary Education, and to provide students and their parents with objective information about the individual student's learning opportunities and achievements.
The information obtained about the overall level of basic secondary education will be used to further identify ways to improve the quality of educational activities and to make informed decisions on the directions for developing basic secondary education.
For the first time, selected tools and procedures of the updated SFA-9 format were piloted in autumn 2026. The pilot involved 2,000 Grade 10 students attending schools that piloted the educational and methodological support of the New Ukrainian School at the basic education level.
Students completed tasks in the language and literature and mathematics educational areas. These tasks were distinctly competency-based, meaning that they required students to apply their knowledge and skills in practice. It is important to note that the tasks were based on the State Standard of Basic Secondary Education rather than on any specific model curriculum. This approach was due to the fact that students at school can now follow different pathways (study under different programs) while ultimately meeting the requirements set out in the standard.
The piloting of the SFA-9 is planned to continue in 2027. The tools and procedures refined following the 2026 pilot will be tested for assessing students' achievements in the language and literature and mathematics educational areas, including through the use of the SEP. Initial testing of tools in other educational areas (civic and historical, natural science, informatics, and foreign language) is also planned.