Bulgaria Revamps High-school Exit Exam

Bulgaria’s Education Minister, Sergey Ignatov, says the matriculation exam results must be analyzed and used to improve education’s quality. Photo by BGNES

The mandatory high-school exit exam in Bulgarian Language and Literature (BEL) will be entirely changed in 2011, Education Minister, Sergey Ignatov, informs Monday.

Next year a computer program will make the test at the time of the exam, mixing all possible questions and tasks from all of its parts. In addition, the matriculation will no longer include a literary analysis, but rather a thought-provoking question to which students will have to respond with an essay.

IT experts at the Education Ministry are also to work on creating a new system for grading the test. In addition to scoring the answers, the system will count the number of words used and the level of knowledge of grammar and punctuation.

Ignatov appealed to parents to stop wasting money on private lessons preparing their high-school seniors for the BEL exam by making them learn topics by heart, and rather use the funds for foreign language or arts education.

“The matriculation system now creates serfs not free citizens. Bulgaria needs educated and free people, who can think,” the Minister pointed out.

The news comes in the aftermath of a scandal involving the last BEL matriculation where answers of the exam leaked on the internet the night before and, allegedly, traded for BGN 600.

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