Aug 28, 2013 10:10 AM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

University of Liberia has decided to grant admission to 1,800 of the 25,000 high school candidates who failed the University's 2013 entrance exam.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said that this year the university officials introduced tough norms for admissions that resulted in the mass failure.

All the 25, 000 school-leavers failed the exam due to lack of basic understanding of English.

Sirleaf, a Nobel peace laureate, said that the country's education system was 'in a mess' following a violent civil war that ended a decade ago. Sirleaf believes that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to restore proper education in the country. 

Previously, admissions were granted based on bribery and influence.

James Dorbor Jallah, who was employed by the university to oversee this year's entrance examination, said that the exam was based on the syllabus of the Ministry of Education and the faculty of the university this year decided that the 'results would be reported on the basis of raw scores.'

"To gain a pass and admission, one would have to make or earn 60 percent in mathematics and 70 percent in English of their raw scores, not curved or scaled results. So on the basis of that, we administered the exam. We went through the tabulation of the results, and it turned out that 308 of the more than 23,000 candidates actually did meet the threshold score in mathematics of 50 percent or above. But absolutely no one was able to reach the threshold score in English of 70 percent. That is why the university has reported that no one passed its admission exam," Dorbor Jallah said.

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