DRC Cuts National State-Exam Correction from 45 Days to 3 with AI-Assisted Scanning

The Democratic Republic of the Congo's Ministry of National Education and New Citizenship modernised correction of the 2025 Examen d'État (EXETAT), the national secondary-school leaving exam, introducing AI-assisted scanning and automated correction alongside continued human review.

To speed up and secure the marking of a national exam sat by hundreds of thousands of candidates, while curbing human error and fraud, and retaining human oversight of the automated process.

Minister of State Raïssa Malu launched a modernised correction centre at the Don Bosco school complex in Kinshasa's Masina commune; two further modernised scanning centres opened in Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi for the 2025 session, digitising scripts locally before sending them to Kinshasa for correction under the supervision of General Inspectorate experts. An early correction start from the second day of the exam in several centres was cited as a key factor behind faster results.

Correction time fell from 45 days to 3 days for the 2025 EXETAT session, which ran across more than 3,000 examination centres nationally; regional figures cited include 92,750 candidates in Bandundu-ville and 44,355 in Bukavu (50.2% girls). The Ministry is also introducing blockchain-secured e-diplomas as part of a wider digital push.

The initiative shows a measurable administrative efficiency gain at national scale, but the Ministry itself acknowledges major unresolved equity gaps — national internet penetration was below 35% in 2024, concentrated in only 5 of 26 provinces, and reaching remote and conflict-affected areas remains unaddressed.