Final examinations have become one of the most important and controversial issues in Iranian education in recent years. Their direct impact on students’ academic futures, especially through the decisive role of grade averages and the repeated changes in university entrance policies, has turned them into a sensitive and widely debated issue among students, families, and the education system.The present study investigates the the language of educational policymaking in texts related to the Ministry of Education’s final examinations and analyzes the linguistic features that reproduce power relations and ideology in the institution’s official texts. The study is conducted within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and draws on Machin and Mayr’s model. The data comprise 300 texts purposively collected from the Ministry’s information portals during the Iranian calendar years 1403–1405. Methodologically, the study adopts a descriptive-analytical, mixed qualitative-quantitative approach. The findings show that, in lexical analysis, lexical selection has the highest frequency and that the texts legitimize institutional authority through word choice. Lexical deletion and overlexicalization also contribute to meaning construction by disregarding students’ stress and psychological pressure while repeatedly emphasizing the definitive or positive effect of grade averages. Furthermore, instability in decision-making and repeated changes in announced programmes may be associated with students’ experiences of confusion and psychological pressure. Reporting verbs naturalize the official narrative, while nominalization and presuppositions remove responsibility from Ministry decision-makers and portray events as natural and rational. Among rhetorical features, hyperbole and metaphor occur most frequently. Modality analysis also reveals the predominance of deontic and epistemic modalities over hedging devices. Overall, the findings indicate that the language of these texts, beyond serving as a means of information dissemination, plays an active role in reproducing competitiveness and educational inequality; by legitimizing the institution’s authority, it restricts opportunities for criticism and questioning regarding the consequences of these policies.