The government Tuesday decided against adding open-ended questions for Japanese and math to the country's new standardized university entrance exams due to start January 2021.
Education minister Koichi Hagiuda said issues such as the potential for errors to be made by private-sector graders, which includes student part-timers, and the difficulty for test-takers to be able to self-assess answers to open-ended questions could not be overcome.
Questions in the current standardized entrance exams are all in multiple-choice format. The scores determine which universities students choose to take further entrance exams.