On August 30, 2026, Georgia’s Minister of Education announced that 1,795 applicants who passed the minimum competency threshold on this year’s Unified National Examinations, but did not secure a place at any university, would be given a second chance. In the first half of September, registration will open for the vacant seats remaining at state and private higher and vocational institutions, and these threshold-passing applicants will be able to register for those programs. The decision was framed as a one-time exception, tied to a transitional year in an ongoing national higher-education reform.
On the surface, this sounds compassionate: give students who fell just short another opportunity. But the more you understand how Georgian admissions actually work, the more this decision troubles me. Let me explain both the mechanics and my concerns.
How Admissions Actually Work in Georgia
To judge this decision, you first need to understand the system it modifies – and it’s worth understanding, because it’s genuinely well-designed.
Georgian university admission runs through the national exams. For most programs, an applicant must pass three subjects: Georgian language, a foreign language, and a third subject of their choice that must match the program. For a psychology program, for example, the third subject can be mathematics, history, or biology. The applicant’s final score is the sum of their performance on the required subjects.
Then comes the part that makes the system fair. Applicants can apply to as many programs as they wish – they build a ranked list of preferences, ordering the programs by where they most want to study. And they can adjust this list freely, adding or removing programs and changing their priorities, right up until one day after the final scores are known. In other words, students get to set their preferences while already knowing exactly how they scored.
Placement then works as a score-driven matching process. On the university side, the logic is simple: each program takes the highest-scoring applicants who ranked it, up to its number of seats. On the student side, you are placed into the highest program on your preference list that still has room for you given your score.
There’s an important consequence of this that many people don’t fully appreciate. The university side cares only about scores, not about where you ranked the program. So if you listed a program as your first choice but your score is lower, and someone else listed that same program as their eighth choice but scored higher, the higher-scoring applicant is placed there ahead of you. Every seat goes to the strongest applicants who wanted it, regardless of ranking position. If you don’t get your first choice, the system automatically moves you down to your next priority, and so on.
There’s even flexibility built in at the level of the third subject. Each program sets aside a number of seats for each third-subject track. At BTU’s psychology program this year, there were 35 places for mathematics, 35 for biology, and 30 for history. When a track doesn’t fill – only 25 students enrolled via biology – the unused seats are automatically reallocated to the other tracks based on score. Nothing is wasted.
The result is an efficient, transparent, score-based matching system. Everyone knows how many seats exist. Everyone can see the programs available. Everyone can list as many as they want, after seeing their scores.
Why This Decision Concerns Me
Once you understand that system, the secondary admissions decision starts to look different.
The first thing that comes to my mind is a hard question: do we need to bring in students who couldn’t get placed under a system this generous and this easy to navigate? The information is all public. You know your score. You know the seat counts. You can add every available program to your list if you simply want to be admitted somewhere. To pass the threshold and still end up unplaced generally means one of two things: either your scores were too low for any program you were willing to attend, or you didn’t rank enough programs to be placed.
I do understand there’s a legitimate case buried in here. Some applicants don’t want just any university – they have specific programs in mind, and they would rather not enroll at all than attend somewhere they didn’t choose. For those students, missing placement is a deliberate choice, not a failure. That’s real. But it doesn’t resolve the deeper problems.
The second issue is more serious: this decision reduces the value of the exams, and of university itself. Imagine getting into a program with essentially no competition, through a vacant-seat round rather than by earning the score. You arrive, you sit in classes you’re not prepared for, you can’t handle the material because you don’t have the foundational knowledge the program assumes – and you drop out. This helps no one. It’s bad for the university, which invested resources in a student who couldn’t continue, and it’s bad for the student, who spent time, money, and effort on something that led nowhere. And in Georgia, this pattern is unfortunately quite common already. Lowering the bar to entry tends to increase it.
The Threshold Should Mean Something
My position is simple: the threshold should mean something. A minimum competency bar that can be bypassed through a special second round isn’t really functioning as a bar. If passing it doesn’t determine access, and not passing well enough can be worked around by policy, then the signal it sends gets weaker.
And this connects to a much larger conversation happening in Georgia right now. There is growing talk that we might, in the future, get rid of the national exams altogether. Decisions like this secondary admissions round – which quietly erode the consequence of exam performance – feed into that direction.
In my opinion, abolishing the national exams would be a serious step back for the country. Whatever their imperfections, the national exams are currently the only unbiased, objective assessment we have. They give everyone an equal chance to get into university and to demonstrate what they know, regardless of who they are, where they come from, or whom they know. In a context where objective, merit-based selection is rare and hard-won, that is not something to give up lightly.
An exam-based admission system isn’t perfect. No selection system is. But it is fair in a way that few alternatives are, and its fairness depends on its results actually counting. Every time we make the outcome negotiable – even with good intentions, even as a one-time exception in a transitional year – we chip away at the one thing that makes the system worth defending.
I hope this really is a one-time exception. And I hope the broader reform strengthens the role of objective assessment in Georgian education rather than weakening it. Because the alternative – a world where getting into university no longer depends on what you can demonstrate you know – would leave Georgian students worse off, not better.
—
Giorgi Tchumburidze
September, 2026