Iran reverses course on university entrance exams, restoring eleventh-grade averages as a weighted factor
On 9 June 2026, Iran's Arabic-language state broadcaster Al-Alam carried a short, blunt announcement: the Deputy Council of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution had decided that eleventh-grade averages would, after all, count positively toward this year's national university entrance exam. The reversal lands barely a year after the same body moved to strip the so-called "tenth-and-eleventh grade coefficient" out of the calculation, a reform that had been sold to a restive student population as a fairer, less memory-cramming alternative.
For Iranian families, the Konkur is more than a test. It is the sorting mechanism that decides who attends a top public university, who takes the subsidized seats in medicine and engineering, and who is routed into less prestigious institutions or, increasingly, into the workforce or the migration pipeline. The decision to put a year and a half of schoolwork back into the score is, in effect, a decision about what kind of merit the Islamic Republic wants to reward — and who can survive the extra burden of an academic year that most students spend almost entirely preparing for the exam.
The original reform, and why it lasted so briefly
The Cultural Revolution's higher education council — formally the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, a body established in 1984 and chaired in practice by the president — had moved in 2025 to scrap the coefficient attached to grades from the tenth and eleventh years of school, leaving the twelfth year as the only continuous-assessment input. The reform was presented as a way to level the playing field for students from weaker schools and from poorer provinces, where private tutoring and exam-prep academies are scarcer. In framing terms, it was the kind of meritocratic correction that officials like to associate with "social justice," the rhetorical centre of the Rouhani-and-Pezeshkian reformist current inside the system.
What the reform did in practice was shift more weight onto a single, high-stakes, four-hour exam. That is a more efficient filter on raw exam technique, but it is also a filter on the families that can afford the year-long cramming courses, the private tutors, and the recentralised mock-exam industry that the Islamic Republic has been trying, off and on for a decade, to bring under tighter control. Critics on both the right and the left of the spectrum inside Iran pointed out that removing the school-year coefficient would, paradoxically, give an edge to exactly the urban, well-off students the reform claimed to want to help.
The case for putting the grades back in
The arguments in favour of restoring the coefficient are familiar. Continuous assessment rewards the student who has worked consistently across the academic year, not the one who can absorb a year of material in a six-week pre-exam sprint. School grades are also harder to game at the institutional level than the centralised Konkur, where coaching empires are a recognised feature of the Tehran real estate market. A weighted school average is, in theory, a partial protection for the student in Zahedan or Ilam against the student in northern Tehran whose parents have paid for a seat at one of the better-known private institutions.
The structural concern is that a single, high-stakes exam rewards exactly the forms of inequality that the Islamic Republic's political class routinely claims to want to correct. Continuous assessment, whatever its bureaucratic costs, pushes the system back toward something closer to a standard school-leaving certificate — a credential with more diverse evidence behind it. Officials who back the reversal frame it as a return to that principle. The opposition, where it exists inside Iran's officially permitted space, frames it as the reimposition of a load that working students and the rural poor cannot bear.
The Cultural Revolution as a referee, not a coach
A useful way to read the body making the decision is as a referee, not a coach. The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution sits above the education ministry, the science ministry, and the university admission apparatus. It draws its authority from a 1984 decree that fused the ideological gatekeeping of the early post-revolutionary period with the administrative reach of a modern state. In recent years it has been the venue where Iran's political factions argue out the meta-rules of the exam — what counts, what does not, and what the next generation of state-loyal professionals is supposed to look like.
The fact that the Deputy Council moved on a single day, with a single Telegram bulletin, tells its own story about how these decisions are now being communicated. Twenty years ago, a shift of this scale would have been a multi-week press campaign, anchored by the minister of science and the head of the national exam organisation. In 2026, the Iranian public learns about a substantive policy reversal in the same medium that delivers the morning's football scores. The content is dense, the framing is terse, and the room for the kind of public commentary that used to surround such changes has been compressed into Telegram channels and a shrinking circle of state-linked outlets.
What the reversal settles, and what it leaves open
The decision puts eleventh-grade averages back into the calculation as a positive factor. It does not, on the evidence so far, restore the tenth-grade average — the original reform had pushed that out as well — and it does not yet specify the exact coefficient to be applied. Those details are typically issued by the national exam organisation (Sanjesh) in the weeks leading up to the exam window, which usually runs in the early summer.
The reversal also leaves a more uncomfortable question unanswered. Iranian education policy has spent the past decade oscillating between two competing instincts: a desire to make the Konkur less crushing, and a desire to make it more rigorous and less susceptible to private tutoring. Each reform tends to expose the limits of the last. The 2025 reform made the exam more intimidating and arguably more unequal. The 2026 reversal redistributes the burden but adds to the load that the average student is expected to carry. Neither iteration has answered the underlying question of what the Konkur is for — a credentialing test, a sorting machine for the civil service and the security establishment, or a screen for the small share of seats that genuinely change a young Iranian's life trajectory.
That third function is, in the end, the one that has hardened over the past five years. The number of well-remunerated graduate positions in Iran has not kept pace with the number of graduates, and the brain-drain figures reported by independent researchers in the diaspora suggest that a large share of the cohort sitting the Konkur in 2026 is doing so with a foreign university, an Erasmus-style exchange, or an exit-visa application somewhere in the back of the mind. Against that backdrop, a shift in the weighting of a school grade is, in the strict policy sense, a small thing. In the political sense, it is the system signalling, once again, that it intends to keep doing the sorting itself.
The wider frame
Iranian education policy rarely makes the international headlines that nuclear talks or the chador debate do. It ought to, because the Konkur is the most consequential single test the state runs and the one that touches the largest share of its young population. The 9 June reversal is, on the face of it, an administrative decision. It is also a reminder that, in the Islamic Republic, the most important shifts in young people's lives are still made by a council most Iranians cannot vote for, communicated through a Telegram channel run by a broadcaster most Iranians do not watch, and justified with a language of social justice that has been in continuous circulation since 1979.
The 2026 cohort now has a few weeks to absorb the new weighting. They will do so, as every Iranian cohort has done since the exam took its modern form, with a mix of exhaustion, calculation, and the unspoken awareness that the rules can change again before the first paper is sat.
Desk note: the wire services in English have not, at the time of writing, run on this announcement; the source material is the 9 June 2026 Al-Alam Telegram bulletin. Monexus has framed the story as an administrative reversal with structural weight, rather than as a stand-alone news peg, on the strength of the Cultural Revolution's role as the meta-rule-setter of the Konkur and of the public debate that has surrounded the 2025 reform in Iranian outlets.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/alalamfa
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Council_of_the_Cultural_Revolution
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_University_Entrance_Exam_(Iran)