The newly adopted Education Reform Strategy 2025–2035 emphasises the urgent need to overhaul Montenegro’s student assessment system to boost academic performance and better prepare students for future challenges.
According to the Strategy, current assessment practices rely too heavily on memorisation and the reproduction of content, which undermines the curriculum’s broader goals of fostering critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Although laws such as the Basic Education Act and Grammar School Act mandate both descriptive and numerical evaluations, real-world classroom practices remain misaligned with these ambitions.
“Assessment practices are lagging behind curricular reforms,” the document warns, highlighting the dominance of summative evaluations over formative ones. The overemphasis on end-of-term grading leaves little room for continuous, competency-based learning, despite years of policy efforts and international recommendations.
The Strategy also points to a lack of progress since poor results in the 2015 PISA testing first flagged the issue. A reform commission was established in 2018 and produced a teacher manual on formative assessment in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic and limited resources stalled implementation.
The government now stresses the importance of revitalising formative assessment practices to close the performance gap, particularly among disadvantaged students. The Strategy concludes that a modern, student-centred approach to assessment is essential for ensuring better learning outcomes and aligning education with labour market needs.
