Education reform put to the test

A heated debate is under way after a troubling number of students failed a trial run of a nationwide high-school exit exam set to be implemented next year, with the government torn as to whether the exam is too hard or if it is necessary to jumpstart reforms for bringing the education system up to more competitive standards. 

One-third of students who took an easier version of the exam failed, while 38 percent failed a harder version, according to results released Nov. 1. The exam, administered in early October, tested students in 1,223 high schools out of the 1,278 in the country on Czech language, mathematics and foreign languages.

Critics of the exam, including Prime Minister Petr Nečas, said the passage rate was unacceptable and the exam needed to be reformed.

"It doesn't give a chance for high schools that aren't ready yet or have different starting points," Ondřej Liška, a former education minister in the government of Mirek Topolánek, told The Prague Post. He said he supported a standardized exam but the approach was wrong, adding that instead, the exam should be adjusted appropriately to the levels of different schools, and then gradually brought up to a single standard.

"If you do that immediately, you will dissolve schools."

However, Education Minister Josef Dobeš has said the exam would not be made easier, and the results are a clear indication that the education system is "sick."

Lucie Kubovičová, a ministry spokeswoman, said the number of failures was also distorted because of the circumstances of the test run. She said students were not motivated to do well because it was only a trial, and it was administered to students with a year still left in school who had not yet been exposed to some subjects. She also cited the inexperience of Czech students with the multiple-choice format of the exam, which she likened to a more American system.

"We needed to examine the logistics and the technologies, because it was the very first test; the results of the students were secondary," Kubovičová said. 

Currently, there is no single exam to compare all students leaving high school, which has led to the devaluation of a high-school degree, she added.

Under the new system, set to take effect in spring 2011, all students would have to choose to take an easier or harder version of the standardized exam in order to graduate. The test has two parts: The first part evaluates students' performance in the Czech language, and in the second part, students can choose to be tested in mathematics or a foreign language. Kubovičová said the expected and acceptable failure rate of the exam when it is implemented is between 15 percent and 20 percent. Students will have two opportunities to pass, and if they fail on the second attempt, they will have to repeat their last year of school.

The hardest part of the exam for students was the math section, which 48 percent of students failed, according to the ministry. Twenty-two percent failed Czech language and literature. Testing irregularities, including technical errors and 500 students who boycotted the exam, were not significant enough to affect results, the ministry said. A much smaller trial exam is slated to be given in March for a last-minute evaluation of the exam before it is officially administered, and practice versions of the exam are going to be posted online.

The trial run cost around 120 million Kč ($6.9 million) to administer, 85 percent of which was paid for using European Union funds, Kubovičová said.

Educators who spoke with The Prague Post echoed the sentiments of the ministry that the exam was necessary, and that the poor results were evidence of a need to reform the system paired with the inexperience of students with such exams and a lack of preparation.

"I would definitely not simplify [the exam]; the mathematical part in its easy version cannot be simplified any more, and the more difficult version seems to be well set," said Naďa Stehlíková, head of Charles University's Department of Mathematics and Mathematic Didactics at the Faculty of Education. "I would not exaggerate the results, because students clearly did not prepare at all. ? It is therefore rather unfortunate that such conclusions are now being made from the results."

Jaroslava Tomášková, a math teacher at a Prague 6 high school on Evropská, agreed it wasn't the difficulty of the exam that was the problem, but the school system itself.

"Some high schools, to be able to function, even accept students without entrance exams. What logically follows is that students in high schools are weaker and weaker," she said. "Students have to adjust to the demands, not the other way around."

But the ministry didn't need to administer the trial exam to see that, according to Liška, who said that before constructing a trial exam, the ministry should have been focused on reforming the educational system, including increasing funding for teachers' pay and creating a better curriculum.

 "It's the stupidity of the political elite that they don't accept that the social standards and prosperity of the country lies within the quality of the educational system, and you cannot get better results without more support," he said.

Kubovičová countered that in order to begin addressing the problem with the curriculum, the ministry needed to establish the exam to identify problem schools.

"The Czech system now is the more children in a school, the more money they get from the state and the ministry, so schools are not paid by quality but by the number of students," she said. "The new graduation tests are the very first step in starting to put quality on top...Some schools will have to close because the parents of the children going to these unsuccessful schools will not send their kids anymore - it's a very natural development."

- Klára Jiřičná contributed to this report.

Cat Contiguglia can be reached at
ccontiguglia@praguepost.com