The first written exams of the first term start in November, and this year, at four grade levels, part of them will come from the ministry rather than from the school. MEB, the Ministry of National Education, has announced its calendar of nationwide common written exams for the 2026-2027 school year: eight exams in total across grades 6, 7, 9 and 10. The first two fall on 11 and 12 November 2026. I have gathered the calendar, how the exam shows up in grades and how to prepare in the short time left into one piece.
What is a common written exam?
Instead of an exam written by the school's own teacher, it is a single exam given in every school in Turkey on the same day and at the same hour. The questions are prepared by the ministry's General Directorate of Measurement, Evaluation and Examination Services, and students sit the exam in their own school, in their own classroom. It replaces one of the regular written exams for that subject in the term; so rather than a separate "extra test", it is a real exam that goes on the report card.
Which grades will take the common exams in 2026-2027?
Grades 6 and 7 in middle school, grades 9 and 10 in high school. What these four levels have in common is that all of them are taught under the Türkiye Yüzyılı Maarif Modeli, the new national curriculum. Eighth graders are preparing for LGS, the high school entrance exam taken at the end of eighth grade, and twelfth graders for YKS, Turkey's university entrance exam, so neither appears on the common exam calendar; grades 5 and 11 are also outside the scope this year.
What are the exam dates and subjects?
In the first term's first round of written exams, sixth graders take Mathematics on Wednesday, 11 November 2026, and tenth graders take Turkish Language and Literature on Thursday, 12 November 2026. The first term's second round comes in January: seventh grade Turkish on Tuesday, 5 January 2027, and ninth grade Mathematics on Wednesday, 6 January 2027.
In the second term the order flips. Seventh graders have Mathematics on Tuesday, 6 April 2027, and ninth graders have Turkish Language and Literature on Wednesday, 7 April 2027. The year's last common exams come in the second week of June: sixth grade Turkish on Tuesday, 8 June 2027, and tenth grade Mathematics on Wednesday, 9 June 2027. That way every grade level sits one common exam in Turkish or literature and one in mathematics over the course of the year.
How does the common exam affect grades?
The exam goes straight into the term grade as one of that term's written exam marks. Its weight is no different from the other written exam the school sets; the difference lies in who writes the questions. So rather than treating the common exam as a separate project, it is enough to know thoroughly the learning outcomes covered in that subject up to that point in the term. The ministry publishes the scope of the exam topic by topic in its guide; once that list is out, the first job is to compare it with the topics the teacher has actually covered.
Is there a make-up exam?
The published calendar contains no make-up exam dates. A student who cannot sit the exam for a valid reason such as illness has their case assessed by the school administration, and the details of how that works are set out in the guide. So the first thing a student with a sick note on exam day needs to do is inform the school; the process runs through the school.
What will the questions be like?
The sample questions the ministry has released recently, together with past common exams, show that the questions test how well a student can tie a learning outcome to everyday life rather than how much they have memorised. In mathematics, questions that ask for an interpretation of a table or a chart dominate; in Turkish, questions that require reading a passage and drawing inferences from it. This style uses longer texts than the textbook examples worked through at school, and where students usually stumble is reading the question all the way to the end and working out what it asks; the subject knowledge is rarely the problem.
Why are common exams held?
The ministry's stated aim is to assess students in the same grade by the same yardstick and to make learning gaps visible across the whole country. Exam difficulty that varied from school to school used to produce different report card grades for two students of equal ability; the common exam narrows that gap. Because results are also analysed at school and province level, it becomes clear which learning outcomes are widely missed, and the ministry feeds that data into its support programmes.
For parents there is one more benefit: the chance to measure a child's mark against every student in Turkey who answered the same questions, instead of against their own class alone. Schools report the result to the student as an individual mark; asking the teacher for the class average and the school average is the simplest way to see where a child really stands.
How should students prepare for the November exams?
There are fewer than four weeks left until the sixth grade mathematics exam on 11 November. The topics covered since the start of the first term, headings such as operations with natural numbers, factors and multiples, and sets, will make up most of the exam. Working through these topics a little every day with short tests is more effective than revising them in one sitting on the weekend before the exam. Our sixth grade topic tests and tenth grade tests were put together for this purpose in the new-generation question format, and since every test ends with worked solutions, students can see their own mistakes.
For tenth graders facing the Turkish Language and Literature exam my advice is different: read one text a day and answer two questions about it in your own words. In literature questions, expression earns points just as knowledge does. There is still time before the January exams for grades 7 and 9; students at those levels can warm up with the seventh and ninth grade tests during the mid-term break, and the real push should come in December.