Istanbul, Turkey · PrivateA private high school on the Ulus campus in Beşiktaş: a school weighted towards mathematics and the sciences, where mathematics and science subjects are taught in a foreign language. The course runs a preparatory year plus four years. Besides two elective tracks - one weighted towards mathematics and science, one towards mathematics and Turkish - the school runs the IB Diploma Programme and a separate track for students applying to universities abroad. On top of English a student picks a second foreign language: German, French or Spanish. Everything a student does outside lessons - clubs, projects, community work - goes into a personal career file and is scored in the school's own MEF reference document. The campus belongs to the MEF Schools group of Arıkanlı Holding; the group's second high school, MEF Science and Technology High School, stands at the same address.
Key facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
College Board · authorised programmeMEF Okulları · 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 →The International Baccalaureate: programmes of a Swiss organisation, among the most widely recognised school programmes in the world. Each stage is authorised separately, so a school may hold one of them, two, or all four. DP is the final stage, ages 16 to 19: six subjects plus a compulsory core of theory of knowledge, an extended essay and CAS. The diploma is accepted by universities all over the world, and in a number of countries it counts for admission on the same footing as the local leaving certificate.
What this means for this school. Authorisation for each stage is granted by the organisation itself after an on-site visit, and a school has to go through it again every few years. Every authorised school in the world stands in the open register at ibo.org, where the status can be checked independently. The IB diploma is awarded by the organisation rather than by the school, and the papers are marked by external examiners, so a leaver's grade does not depend on how strict their own school is with them.
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.
Schools of the company MEF Okulları A.Ş., which on its own pages is called an enterprise of Arıkanlı Holding; the founder is İbrahim Arıkan, and the network writes that from 1988 he studied the school systems of the United States, Japan, Germany, Russia and England on the spot, and set up his own model in 1996. The Ulus campus in Istanbul holds five schools - a kindergarten, a primary, a middle, a high school and a Fen ve Teknoloji Lisesi, - and separately the network names two schools of the international line, MEF International Schools in Istanbul and in Izmir. Alongside the schools the holding has MEF University. The network publishes no combined number of schools or campuses.
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.