A Turkish university student made headlines after deliberately attempting to answer all 180 questions wrong on Türkiye's national university entrance exam, which drew some 1.5 million test-takers in June 2006. Sefa Boyar said afterward he was confident he had achieved his goal of zero correct answers.
Boyar, already enrolled in a construction engineering program at an Ankara university, said he prepared seriously for the exam, since he needed to know the right answers before he could avoid them. Because the scoring system deducts one correct answer for every four wrong ones, his target score was minus 45.
His stunt was intended as a protest against what many consider an unfairly difficult centralized exam. The test is widely regarded as a turning point in young people's lives, with only about one in four applicants succeeding. A degree is seen as essential to employment in a country where joblessness exceeds 10 percent.
The exam day each year functions as a national event: traffic is redirected near testing centers, horn-honking is prohibited, and broadcasters air live coverage with expert answer breakdowns. Education critics have long called for reforms that would steer students toward vocational schools as a viable alternative.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in June 2006, in its own words.