The Final Countdown: Navigating the May 19th Pressure Peak in Lebanese Schools

Lebanon's 2025-2026 school year didn't end with a single high-stakes exam day. It ended with the Cabinet cancelling the Baccalaureate outright in late June 2026 and replacing it with continuous assessment. But for Lebanese schools, the real pressure peak landed earlier — in mid-May 2026, when a cancelled Brevet exam, a still-shifting Baccalaureate schedule, and total uncertainty about which rulebook would apply forced every school to prepare for more than one outcome at once.

Two Certificates, Two Different Fates

By mid-May 2026, Lebanon's two major school-leaving certificates were on completely different tracks. Education Minister Rima Karami had already submitted a decree to cancel that year's official Brevet (Grade 9 / EB9) exam, citing the year's disruption from conflict and displacement (L'Orient Today). In its place: each school would run its own final exam and factor in the year's school grades — no centralized paper, no CRDP-issued Dawra to lean on.

The Baccalaureate, meanwhile, was still on. As of that same week, the Ministry's plan called for three sessions — June 29, July 27, and September 7, 2026 — with each student sitting two of the three rounds (L'Orient Today; corroborated the same week by Lexis Middle East).

Why Mid-May Was the Real Pressure Point

That combination — one certificate already cancelled and reassigned to schools, the other still running on an increasingly complicated multi-session format — is what actually strained Lebanese teachers in spring 2026. Grade 9 teachers had to start producing exam-quality, curriculum-aligned final exams in-house, on short notice, with no official past paper to model. Terminale teachers, at the same time, still had to prepare students for a Baccalaureate whose exact shape kept changing week to week. Two tracks, two timelines, one teaching staff — well before anyone knew the Baccalaureate itself would be cancelled a month later.

Then the Ground Shifted Again

It didn't stop there. After weeks of public controversy — over whether students displaced by the conflict were prepared, and whether exam centers were even safely reachable — the Cabinet cancelled the Baccalaureate too, in late June 2026 (L'Orient Today). Both certificates ended up decided by continuous assessment instead of a final paper.

Students qualified for their certificate of secondary studies provided they had averaged at least 9.5 out of 20 across the school year — reported by Gulf News as the Cabinet's stated criterion.

What This Means Going Into Next Year

A few things are now hard to ignore, given what actually happened this cycle:

• Brevet cancellations aren't a one-off. The exam has now been called off in 2024, 2025, and 2026, for three different reasons — funding shortfalls, COVID-era disruption, and this year's conflict (LBCI, Blog Baladi).
• Ministry decisions can change with only weeks of notice. The gap between the mid-May plan and the late-June reversal was barely six weeks.
• Continuous assessment raises the number of moments that count, not lowers it — every trimester exam is now potential certification evidence, not just internal practice.
• Schools can't assume a long lead time to build rigorous, in-house final exams before the next Ministry decision lands.

Where Imtihan Fits

Whichever way the Ministry decides next year, the work that actually falls on teachers is the same: producing rigorous, curriculum-aligned exam material fast, without months of lead time. Imtihan's Bac Libanais curriculum data already includes the EB9 (Brevet) level for Math, Physics, and Chemistry, so a teacher facing a compressed, in-house-final-exam scenario like this spring's isn't starting from a blank page — they describe what they need, get a structured draft and a full corrigé back in minutes, and review and adjust from there. It doesn't replace the Ministry's decisions. It replaces the hours of manual drafting those decisions keep forcing onto short notice.