There is only one element of the External Independent Evaluation (ZNO) in the state final certification for 4th-grade students – the tasks will be developed by the Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment. The certification will not be mandatory during martial law. In 2026, it is planned to involve up to 10,000 students in the piloting. This was reported to UNN by Tetiana Vakulenko, director of the Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment.
How the assessment for 4th-grade students will take place
From the abbreviation ZNO, in this story, there is only one thing – the tasks will be developed by the Ukrainian Center, nothing more. Fourth-graders will undergo assessment in their educational institutions, and their teachers will conduct and evaluate them. But they will only return these results to our system so that we can automatically generate a report for them, which will contain information about the child's academic achievements so that we can work and support the child in their further education.
She explained that the assessment for 4th-grade students will be in paper format, not on computers.
There will be not only tasks for choosing the correct answer or writing, there will be oral materials where the child will speak independently in the classroom, and the teacher will evaluate independently.
Will the certification be mandatory for all schools?
Vakulenko emphasized that the certification will not be mandatory during martial law. Educational institutions will voluntarily agree to it.
This is only about gradual work on creating such a system, which does not exist. That is, we are talking about the fact that before COVID-19, there was a DPA system where each educational institution independently developed tools. We want to return to the idea of the existence of DPA so that data in the system and in the state are preserved.
During the forum of educators and employers: "Youth cannot be held back, they must be let go," Vakulenko explained that returning to the DPA is necessary for the state to have an idea of what is happening in the primary link.
The COVID-19 pandemic was, now we are in a full-scale invasion, many international organizations are discussing the issue of educational losses, but who can really calculate educational losses? They cannot. We want to have a system where this can be done.
According to her, this assessment is being returned to identify certain gaps in the knowledge of 4th-grade students.
For example, when a child graduates from 11th grade and cannot find 60% of a number, and we might have found out about it a little earlier and taught them how to do it, instead of surprisingly finding out that we have an applicant who cannot do it.
In addition, Vakulenko noted that they want to adapt AI to the DPA.
We want to adapt and are already working on an artificial intelligence model so that based on the results of this assessment, a report for the child and parents is automatically generated in human language, which will say: You did great, well done. But you don't know this and that, but you did this simply fantastically with the maximum score.
How many 4th-grade students are planned to be involved in the DPA in 2026
We have been piloting this certification for two years in schools that were ready to cooperate with us and voluntarily agreed to it. Looking at the real results of 4th-grade students, we calibrated the difficulty so that it met the needs of fourth-graders. Based on the piloting results, we saw that too many tasks were offered in one selection and reduced this number. We did the piloting in 2024, and in 2025, we worked with a sample of up to 2,000 students. For next year, we plan to pilot up to 10,000 students.
Addition
Earlier, it was reported that from 2027, the state final certification for 4th-grade students will take place in the form of an external independent evaluation and will become mandatory for primary school students.