Baccalauréat Practice Tests in Cameroon: The Impact of SMS-Based Exam Preparation

In Cameroon, no exam is more important than the baccalauréat, which serves as the gateway to adulthood and professional and higher-education aspirations. We build on existing literature on the benefits of practice tests to evaluate how SMS-based quizzes could help students in their final year of secondary school prepare for the baccalauréat. Students in 23 schools across Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, received multiple-choice questions four times per week for nine weeks leading up to the exam date. We examined baccalauréat pass rates and student feedback through 11 focus groups. We find that students used our practice tests for formative assessment and as a prompt for recall and review of study material. SMS-based quizzes were not isolated artifacts but were shared in the students' networks, built a distributed learning environment, and used as a focus of collaborative study sessions.

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