Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — Public debate is gaining momentum on social media regarding Uzbekistan’s participation in the international PISA assessment, which measures the educational performance of 15-year-old students.

The discussion was sparked by a statement from Shokir Tursun, an educator and one of the authors of the National Curriculum for the Uzbek language, published on his Telegram channel. Tursun voiced concern over reports that all 14 presidential schools in Uzbekistan were included in the sample selected for the 2025 PISA study.

He argued that such a decision could be interpreted as an attempt to “artificially inflate results,” given that students from these elite schools represent a negligible fraction of the country’s total student population—approximately 0.04%, or less than 1%. Tursun claimed this undermines the principle of representativeness and casts doubt on the objectivity of the forthcoming results.

In response to the criticism, Minister of Preschool and School Education, Hilola Umarova, stated on the social media platform X that the sample of 233 schools was formed based on the principle of random selection. She emphasized that the selection process was not carried out by the ministry itself, but by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which conducts the PISA assessment.

“The Ministry does not take part in choosing the schools. What matters to us is honest analysis, not polished statistics,” the minister stated. However, she neither confirmed nor denied the inclusion of all presidential schools in the sample.