Çekmeköy Sınav Koleji
Istanbul, Turkey · est. 2009 · PrivateÇekmeköy Sınav Koleji is a private school in Çekmeköy on the Asian side of Istanbul and a campus of the Sınav Eğitim Kurumları group. The campus has been teaching since 2009 on a nine-dönüm plot, half of which is kept as garden. One site holds the kindergarten, primary school, middle school, an Anatolian high school and a science high school. English is taught through the school's own programmes: a bilingual Side to Side programme in the kindergarten, then its own testing office and preparation for TOEFL. High school work falls into two parts: grades 9 and 10 focus on core subjects with extra English, while grades 11 and 12 prepare for the Turkish university entrance exams TYT, AYT and YKS with weekly mock papers and problem-solving sessions.
Key facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
College Board · authorised programmeSınav Eğitim Kurumları · school is part of the networkWhat stands behind each entry
An American organisation that allows a school to put the letters AP on a pupil's transcript. The permission is granted course by course and tied to a particular teacher, it has to be renewed every year, and College Board reads the course syllabus before granting it.
What the badge means for this school. The school is allowed to run advanced AP courses - not the school as a whole, but one by one: by subject and by teacher. Governance, safeguarding and the primary years are not part of that check. Which subjects are actually approved is visible in the ledger. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →Advanced Placement: American advanced courses for the senior years. The exam for a course is set and marked by the College Board, not by the school. A good result is counted by American universities as a first-year course already passed, which saves a student time and money.
What this means for this school. A school does not get to call a course AP automatically: the College Board reads the course syllabus and approves it separately for every subject and every teacher, and the permission has to be renewed each year. Every approved school in the world is listed in the open AP Course Ledger, and this school's entry there stands as a line in the accreditation block above. How many courses a school is approved for, and in which subjects, the ledger does not show in its general listing. AP has no leaving certificate of its own: it sits on top of the school's main programme rather than being a separate system.
The state school programme of the country the school stands in: it is set by that country's ministry of education, which also licenses the school and awards the leaving certificate. That certificate is used for entry to local universities, and abroad it is matched to the local one.
What this means for this school. This entry does not count towards the score, and that is deliberate. Every lawful school in a country works to the national programme, so on its own it tells one school apart from no other - unlike the French, German or Russian programmes, which are carried abroad and confirmed by the register of their organisation. We show it because a parent needs to know what programme their child is taught and what certificate the child will get. Counting it would lift the whole ranking at once and still tell nobody apart.
A commercial group which its own site describes as a family business, begun in 1992 with premises of fifty square metres and five employees; the chairman of the board is Metin Özer. Its numbers about itself diverge, and we give both: the "Hakkımızda" page speaks of "almost 400 branches" and more than ten thousand employees, while the "Kurumlarımız" list runs to 307 lines. And those lines are not about schools: 170 of the 307 are named Sınav İleri Kurs or Sınav Kurs, that is courses, and there are about a hundred and thirty-five schools. The group counts as a school a separately licensed institution of a single stage - kindergarten, primary, middle, high school, - and at the high school level it divides by type: the list holds both separate Anadolu Lisesi entries and combined names of the form "Anadolu ve Fen Lisesi". The geography is unbroken, from Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir down to district centres; Ankara and Istanbul have the most lines.
What this means for this school. The network owns or operates the school. Its accreditation and programme authorisation the school obtains separately, in its own name.