Central high school diploma

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A Central Abitur is an Abitur examination in which the written examination tasks are prepared by a central authority . In Germany this is usually the Ministry of Culture of the country .

Historical development until today in the German countries

The central high school diploma has the longest tradition in Bavaria . Here the written Abitur exams have been made by the ministry since 1854. Only in exceptional situations such as the war and post-war years of the two world wars did the ministry leave this task to the schools. Also Baden and Wuerttemberg knew in the 19th century temporarily centralized final exams.

After the Second World War, the French occupying forces introduced a central examination procedure in their zone. She took the Baccalauréat , which has existed as a central and anonymous examination since 1808, as a model. This measure affected the states of South Baden , South Württemberg-Hohenzollern , Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate . After the end of the occupation, Rhineland-Palatinate abolished the central high school diploma. In Baden-Württemberg , which was formed in 1952, there was initially a central high school diploma in the formerly French-administered areas, and a decentralized high school diploma in the former American north. Since the 1960s, the central task has been gradually introduced throughout the country by the ministry. The Saarland also held on to the central high school diploma.

After German unification in 1990, four of the five new federal states ( Saxony , Saxony-Anhalt , Thuringia and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania ) opted for the central high school diploma familiar from the GDR . Only Brandenburg , which was strongly oriented towards North Rhine-Westphalia , took over the decentralized Abitur, which is predominant in the west, in which the tasks are submitted by the teachers and approved and selected by the school inspectorate.

After 2000, partly with reference to the PISA studies , a new, nationwide trend towards the central high school diploma began:

Since the 2009/2010 school year, joint Abitur exams in German, English, French and mathematics have been taking place in the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg. In the 2011/2012 school year, these were expanded to include the subjects of biology, geography and all foreign languages, and since the 2014/2015 school year they have been expanded to include chemistry, physics and history.

15 of the 16 countries are currently taking a central high school diploma. Only in Rhineland-Palatinate is there still a decentralized Abitur. Here, the course teachers submit several suggested tasks, which are checked by specialist advisors and corrected if necessary. This will ensure compliance with EPA ( E COHERENT P rüfungs A equirements) and the formal legislation.

Procedure using the example of Baden-Württemberg

In the case of the Central Abitur, teachers selected nationwide (who usually do not prepare their own course for the Abitur at the relevant date) are asked to suggest Abitur tasks. A commission selects from these proposals. In a multi-stage process, the tasks are checked and reformulated if necessary.

In Baden-Württemberg, the selection of the task teachers is sometimes carried out as follows: The four regional councils or the respective departments for schools and education are instructed to set tasks. These ask the schools to propose tasks according to their own procedure. The selected school designates a teacher who works out the tasks. An attempt is made to appoint different teachers every year. It can happen that teachers set tasks that prepare a course for the Abitur themselves. This is especially true for subjects that are not widely used. Example: Information technology in a technical high school .

The examination tasks of the central high school diploma thus come about with the participation of a considerable number of experienced teachers, with the decisive staff being renewed only slowly over the years. This personal continuity guarantees extensive continuity in the type and difficulty of the tasks. On the other hand, the cultural bureaucracy can also give impulses for the realignment of lessons through surprising subtasks, and this much more efficiently than by changing the curriculum.

The correction takes place in Baden-Württemberg in three rounds. The first correction takes place by the specialist teacher on the basis of the given solution advice, whereby the point distribution is given, again depending on the subject. The work is coded by the school management and thus anonymized. The regional councils then anonymously distribute the work to other schools for a second correction. The first and second correctors do not record their points in the work, but on a separate form, whereby the second corrector does not find out the distribution of points and the total number of points of the first corrector. The exams go back to the regional councils and from there to anonymous third-party correctors, usually specialist advisers or department heads (A 15). They also receive the results of the first and second correction. In the end, you finally determine the grades, whereby you are usually only allowed to move between the grades of the first and second correction. There is no communication between the reviewers of the three rounds. The first corrector receives the final result before the oral Abitur examination, but no information on what any deviations from his grade are based on.

Special features in other German countries

In Lower Saxony, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia, the examination tasks are made available to schools in encrypted form via the Internet. This means that on each working day before one of the nationally set exam dates, members of the school management and other teachers have to download, decrypt, copy and, if necessary, select extensive documents. On the day of the exam, the schools also have to constantly check their e-mails, as it is not uncommon for ambiguities or errors in the Abitur tasks to be recognized by the subject teacher and therefore to be corrected immediately before or even during the ongoing examination.

Tendency towards better grades through the introduction of the central high school diploma

When in 2005 several countries began to switch from the decentralized Abitur to central exams, six countries that had been practicing a central Abitur for some time recorded the best Abitur grades. They ranged between 2.3 and 2.5, while the countries with a decentralized Abitur had results between 2.5 and 2.7. With the introduction of the central baccalaureate, however, the results have also improved in these countries, which on the one hand indicates the lowering of the requirements and, on the other hand, may be due to an increasing tailoring of the teaching content with regard to exam relevance.

Problems

Problems have repeatedly arisen when carrying out the central examinations. In 2008, two North Rhine-Westphalian advanced course assignments in the subject of mathematics attracted nationwide attention. Many students failed because of them, while other schools succeeded in solving them. In individual advanced courses, 50 percent or more of the students had to take the re-examination. In the face of public protests, the ministry gave those affected the opportunity to write a new exam. 1801 high school graduates made use of this, three quarters of whom improved by an average of two grade points. The basic and advanced courses in mathematics were affected by similar mishaps in Hesse in 2009. Here, too, the written test could be repeated.

Austrian Central Matura

In Austria, with the Matura year 2015 for all general secondary schools and with the Matura year 2016 also for all vocational higher schools, a nationwide standardized central Matura was introduced. The tasks for the written exams are identical throughout Austria, the tasks for the oral exams follow a centrally prescribed scheme, but are formulated individually at the schools. In addition, a pre-academic paper must be written.

When the vault of the Academic Gymnasium Salzburg was broken into in May 2015, the perpetrator, looking for money, tore open an envelope with the examination questions for Latin and thus triggered "Plan B": All of Austria's 700 high school graduates received the 6-year long Latin form uniform substitute questions. These were encrypted and transmitted to the schools online the evening before; the password was only announced on the day of the exam at 6:30 a.m. The tasks were printed out directly at the schools; the examinations for the high school graduates did not start until 10:00 a.m. and thus 2 hours later than originally planned.

Situation in other states

The French Baccalauréat and the Lithuanian Abitur are also written centrally with standardized tasks.

In Russia, passing the unified state examination has been a compulsory criterion for admission to universities since 2009 .

In 2005, the Central Abitur for the humanistic subjects was introduced in Poland, followed by mathematics and the natural sciences in 2009.

literature

  • Bölling, Rainer: Brief history of the Abitur , Paderborn: Schöningh 2010.
  • Herdegen, Peter: School exams: origin - development - function. Exams at the Bavarian grammar school from the 18th to the 20th century , Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt 2009.
  • Hoymann, Tobias: Rethinking after the Pisa shock. The all-German central high school diploma as a motor for competition in educational federalism. Marburg: Tectum-Verlag 2005.
  • Klein, Esther Dominique / Kühn, Svenja Mareike / van Ackeren, Isabell / Block, Rainer: How central are central exams? Final exams at the end of upper secondary level in a national and international comparison , in: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 55, 2009, pp. 596–621.

Web links

Wiktionary: Zentralabitur  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://bildungsserver.berlin-brandenburg.de/unterricht/pruefungen/ .
  2. ↑ Uniform examination requirements in the Abitur examination according to the KMK agreement of October 24, 2008 .
  3. ^ Botho Stumpf: Pros and Cons of the Central Abitur with special consideration of the procedure in Baden-Württemberg. In: Mathematics Lessons. 39 (1), 59, 1993.
  4. ↑ Abitur grades in a country comparison 2005 ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 31 kB).  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gew.de
  5. ^ Rainer Bölling, Even a central high school diploma does not guarantee quality, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 17, 2011, p. 8 .
  6. ^ Spiegel Online - "The Abi-Chaos of North Rhine-Westphalia" .
  7. ^ Ministry for Schools and Further Education, School in North Rhine-Westphalia. Education report 2009, Düsseldorf 2009, p. 68 ( Memento of the original from February 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file; 5.5 MB).  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schulministerium.nrw.de
  8. ↑ Spiegel Online - “High school graduates get a second chance” .
  9. ↑ http://salzburg.orf.at/news/stories/2751070/ Zentralmatura unintentionally sabotaged: Haft, orf.at, 7 January 2016, accessed 7 January 2016.
  10. ↑ http://salzburg.orf.at/news/stories/2710545/ Latin Matura: “Plan B” works, orf.at, May 13, 2015, accessed January 7, 2016.
  11. ↑ Sonja Steier, A Balance Sheet of Polish School Policy since 1989 in Poland Analyzes, No. 76, October 5, 2010 (PDF file; 487 kB).