The Final Sprint: Navigating Lebanon’s High-Stakes Exam Season with AI Precision

Lebanon's official Brevet exam — normally a centrally written, centrally graded national exam — has now been cancelled for three years running: 2024, 2025, and again in 2026. Each time, the job of producing a nationally-recognized final exam shifted from the Ministry onto individual schools and their own teachers, usually with only weeks of notice. That's the real "sprint" behind this exam season, and it's a pattern, not a one-off.

A Pattern, Not a One-Off

The 2026 cancellation, submitted as a decree by Education Minister Rima Karami and approved by Cabinet, cited the year's conflict and mass displacement as the reason (L'Orient Today). But it wasn't the first. The 2025 Brevet was also cancelled, that time over funding shortfalls in the middle of the country's financial crisis (LBCI), and 2024's exam was called off for logistical reasons tied to the same disrupted stretch of years (Blog Baladi). Three consecutive years, three different official reasons, one consistent outcome: no centralized Brevet paper.

What "School-Based Final Exam" Actually Means for Teachers

In place of the Ministry's paper, each school now runs its own final exam and combines it with the student's grades across the year to decide whether they earn the Brevet-equivalent certificate. That sounds like a small administrative substitution. In practice, it means the people actually writing a nationally-consequential exam are classroom teachers — not CRDP-vetted exam-setters — and they're doing it without an official past paper (Dawra) to model, because there isn't one for a school-authored exam.

The Compressed Timeline Problem

The Brevet cancellation decision and the adjusted Baccalaureate schedule landed in the same narrow window — mid-May 2026, per Lexis Middle East's dated coverage. That left schools weeks, not months, to stand up a final exam that still had to be defensible as the basis for a national certificate.

Where Precision Can't Slip

Writing an "official-equivalent" exam under those conditions carries different stakes than an ordinary internal quiz:

1. It has to map to real curriculum chapters — not just whatever a teacher remembers covering that term.
2. Difficulty and structure need to be consistent across every section and every teacher writing one, so grades stay comparable.
3. It needs a matching corrigé, so multiple teachers grading in parallel apply the same standard.
4. It has to happen fast — nobody was given a normal exam-writing runway this year.

The replacement system took "school grades for the year, as well as those from the final exam organized by each institution," into account as the alternative to a centralized Brevet paper — the mechanics reported around the ministry's own announcement.

AI Precision as the Practical Answer

This is exactly the gap Imtihan is built to close — not by deciding what the exam should cover, but by removing the hours of manual drafting once a teacher already knows the chapters and level. Imtihan's Bac Libanais curriculum data includes the EB9 (Brevet/Grade 9) level for Math, Physics, and Chemistry: a teacher describes the chapters and difficulty mix, and gets a structured exam plus a full step-by-step corrigé back in minutes, ready to review, edit, or regenerate exercise-by-exercise before it goes in front of students. For a compressed, no-lead-time scenario like this year's Brevet replacement, that's the difference between writing from a blank page under pressure and reviewing a solid first draft.