Twisting his short hair with his left hand and sipping a cup of coffee with his right, Natnael Shumye was seated in a plastic chair on the veranda of Dodo Bar, a restaurant on King George VI Street in the Arat Kilo neighbourhood. Right in front of the cafe, across the road, is the Menelik II Preparatory School, the first-ever modern school in the country.

On Tuesday, November 9, 2021, high school students like Natnael were taking the national exams for Grade 12. Sitting in the restaurant, Natnael and three of his teenage friends, all students at the school, talked about the exams in a hushed tone with a look of anxiety on their faces. All of them had finished taking their aptitude tests that morning and were readying to return to the school for more exams in the afternoon.

Natnael and his friends were four of over 1,000 students who had graduated from Menelik II Preparatory in May this year, despite not taking their matriculation exams. They had little choice but to stay home for the past six months, awaiting federal officials to announce when they could finally sit for the tests. Six months was too long a wait for Natnael, and he began doing odd jobs with his family to make some money. Neither did he use the time to study and prepare for the exams.

“It's difficult to keep studying when you don’t know when the exam would be,” Natnael said.

This has been the reality for over half a million matriculating students who sat for the exams last week at over 2,000 examination centres across the country, barring Tigray Regional State and parts of the Amhara Regional State. Close to 618,000 students had been registered for the exams.

Students in the North Wello zone, Wag Hemra, South Wello and North Gonder zones could not take the tests as the 131 examination centres remain closed due to the conflict raging in the area.

Officials at the National Educational Assessment & Examination Agency do not estimate how many students have been left out in Tigray, though they disclosed no matriculating students there sat for the exams. The Agency’s communications director, Redi Shifa, says his office could not register any students in Tigray before the examination period.

However, no less than 36,000 students in the Amhara region were excluded from the exams. The figure represents 20pc of all matriculating students in the Amhara region.

Despite the tens of thousands excluded, the number of students taking the examinations this year is double the figure from last year. A policy shift enacted two years ago scrapped the requirement for Grade 10 students to take national examinations. Natnael and his friends were in 10th Grade when the policy was introduced, and nearly all of their peers passed to the next grade, leading to a high number of examinees this year.

Students who failed the Grade 10 exams would have joined technical and vocational schools (TVETs). A large number of students are slated to enrol in TVETs this year.

“I expect the TVETs would be ready,” Redi said.

Unusually, an even lower number of students joined public universities last year. Only 147,000 students were assigned to the country’s 46 public universities from the over 300,000 students who sat for the matriculation exams. Matching this seems unlikely this year as several universities have closed in areas where the militarized conflict is expanding. Five public universities in Meqelle, Axum, Adigrat, Raya and Woldiya remained closed beginning mid this year as a result of the worsening conflict. Over 14,000 students were forced to leave campuses in July this year.

According to Amelework Hizkeal, communications director at the Ministry of Education, there is nothing certain about how many students the remaining universities will accommodate.

“We'll know more when universities disclose their capacities after the exam results are announced,” Amelework told Fortune.

If the five non-operational universities remain closed for longer, the Ministry would be unable to do anything but continue with the remaining universities.

“This isn’t something only the Ministry of Education will deal with," she said.