Most school exams in Turkey used to end with a row of letters: A, C, D, B. From this school year, in grades 5 to 7 and 9 to 11, they end with paragraphs. The Ministry of Education opened a single platform, the Joint Written Exam System, that teachers now use to build, score and analyse school-wide written exams, and the questions on those papers are open-ended.
If you are studying anywhere else, the Turkish rollout is still worth a look, because the shift from multiple choice to written answers is happening in a lot of school systems and it changes how you have to prepare.
What actually changes?
The scoring logic. In a multiple-choice exam, the only thing on the page is your final choice, so elimination works: rule out two options, guess between the rest, move on. In an open-ended exam the marker sees your reasoning, and the mark scheme usually gives points for the steps, not only for the final number. That cuts both ways. A correct answer with no working can lose points, and a wrong final answer with a sound method can keep most of them.
The second change is quieter. You cannot recognise your way through the paper any more. Recognition is enough to pick the right option out of four; it is not enough to produce a definition, build an argument or lay out a solution from an empty line.
How are the papers built?
In the Turkish system, teachers in the same subject group pick a scenario at the start of the year and write two open-ended questions for it, together with the mark scheme. The rest of the paper is pulled from a national question pool, filtered by difficulty. Teachers then enter the score for each question separately, so the result is not a single grade but a breakdown by learning outcome.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. When marks are recorded question by question, a report can say which skill is missing rather than that the student got 62. Parents see the same breakdown, and progress in one subject can be compared across exams.
How should you study for an exam like this?
Write your solutions out, even when you are practising with multiple-choice questions. The habit you need is turning the steps you normally run through in your head into lines on paper. Three questions written out in full are better preparation than thirty skimmed.
Then practise restating the question. Open-ended papers often wrap a short task in a long piece of context: a situation, a short dialogue, a table. Reading that and writing one sentence that says what is being asked keeps you from answering a question nobody asked, which is where a surprising share of marks goes.
The third habit is studying from the syllabus rather than from the textbook's page order. Learning outcomes are what the mark scheme is built on, so listing them and marking your own confidence next to each one turns a vague plan into a short, specific one.
Practice questions still help, as long as you use them differently: solve, then write the method, then check. Our reasoning tests and brain games work on the thinking side of this, and if you are preparing for an exam season in general, how to study for exams efficiently and why understanding a topic is not the same as solving problems cover the study habits that sit underneath.
Will marks drop at first?
Often, yes, and it usually says little about the student. Averages tend to dip in the first term after a switch like this, because a skill that used to earn marks, narrowing down options, stops earning them, and the skill that replaces it, explaining your reasoning in writing, takes a few weeks to build. The students who recover fastest are the ones who start writing their answers out before the exam asks them to.