About 2.24 million elementary school sixth-graders and third-year junior high school students took the national achievement examination Tuesday.
When the results are known around August, the education ministry will allow them to be made available on a school-by-school and municipality-by-municipality basis for the first time since the exams resumed in 2007 after a 43-year hiatus.
"We would like to explore which method of publicizing (the results) will help boost academic capabilities," education minister Hakubun Shimomura said at a news conference in Tokyo.
All public schools and 47 percent of private schools administered the tests in Japanese and mathematics. About 1,123,000 sixth-graders from 20,395 elementary schools and some 1,118,000 third-year students from 10,248 junior high schools took the exams.