Great joy, but also great disappointment. Some got in, some came out of this year's entrance exams empty-handed. And so the question is: is the Cermate system fair? A topic for Eva Mikulka Šelepová, an editor at Czech Radio who specialises in education.
How did the entrance exams go this year?
I would say there are no surprises. The CERMAT summary statistics show that. In the Czech language tests, pupils performed the same as last year, but they did worse in mathematics, where their performance was on average 5.6 percentage points worse than a year ago. According to the CERMAT data, the candidates got almost 56 per cent of the Czech language tests correct on average, while in mathematics it was less than 40 per cent.
Deterioration in mathematics - this is not the first time that Czech pupils and students are getting worse year by year...
It's true. It seems that mathematics is becoming less and less popular among Czech schoolchildren. We can see it in the state matriculation exams. In recent years, they have more often preferred to take a matriculation exam in a foreign language than to choose mathematics. Returning to the entrance examinations, because that is what we are talking about here today, it is interesting that in this year's entrance examinations for secondary schools, we have seen the biggest drop compared with last year's results among children who applied to six-year grammar schools. There were just over 7 000 of them and their pass rate was 9 per cent lower, for eight-year grammar schools it was a drop of 6.4 per cent, and ninth-graders who applied to traditional four-year grammar schools were 6 per cent worse off in mathematics than their performance a year ago. When we asked Miroslav Krejčí, director of the CERMAT organisation, about this in our broadcast, he said there were two possible reasons - either that this year's tests were harder or that pupils were less prepared.
When you say that you don't think there were any surprises, you are probably also referring to the fact that the pupils got worse in maths again. Was there a surprise or was there a catch?
It is probably not possible to generalize it completely, because such fluctuations have been quite common in the last few years since we have had a single entrance exam. Sometimes it can be that pupils get worse in Czech and so on, so I wouldn't say. It may be related to the fact that, in short, the people at CERMAT who set the uniform admission tests, who think up the assignments, have made the tasks a bit harder than what the children are prepared for. That is probably the most logical explanation.
Ambiguous tasks
Was there a catch, something that the students didn't catch on to at all?
I wouldn't exactly say that. There have been a few questionable roles that have been discussed in the media. I'll give you an example, probably the most talked about, the most well-known task, which has been discussed a lot on social media. It was a sentence analysis and, in simple terms, candidates had to find the subject in the sentences. One of them was, and I'm quoting now: "Because the bugs didn't have windows." If you, like me, didn't know what a brochie was...
I'm not getting caught anymore, that's the first thing. Brooches?
Brochy. This is perhaps to throw the candidates off a bit so that they can work with a sentence where they don't know the meaning of one word, but are simply going for sentence structure. I think so. But part of the task was a rather longer text, and there was an explanation of what the brochs were.
Oh, so there was context.
There was context.
Brooches are, sorry, what?
Stone towers in Scotland.
Okay, and what was that sentence?
"Because the bugs didn't have windows."
He was looking for...
Subject.
So, brooches.
Yes, you could say. But if the sentence were in ungrammatical Czech, the sub-subject could be windows, and that is what some language experts are pointing out. List News, which contacted several Czech language experts and asked them about it, said that the assignment wasn't that clear and that the problem could have two solutions. Thus, if someone wrote that windows are a subobject, that should also be taken as the correct answer.
Even windows, they can be a sub-subject in this sentence... I search in vain for them as a sub-subject, but there are other experts for that.
However, this was some controversial moment. If such a controversial moment appears, as it probably did, the students can appeal, they can criticise. That happens sometimes, every year some assignments are criticized. Then what are the chances that somebody will get some justice if the experts do not agree that it is a clear-cut task?
There have been many controversial roles throughout history. A few years ago, the then director of CERMAT (Jiří Zíka - editor's note) even quit because of it. He was dismissed by the Minister of Education, Robert Plaga, because ambiguous tasks were not only in the admission tests, but also in the matriculation examination that year, so that was the reason for the end of one director.
What are the options... Legal representatives or teachers, in short, any adult can complain, and now I suspect to the regional authorities, but certainly directly to the Ministry of Education, because it is the founder of CERMAT, it is its contributory organization. Ambiguous, questionable or bad assignments are no exception in the history of CERMAT. If it happens like this year with the brochas, as we said a moment ago, there is a clear procedure. The CERMAT director said on our broadcast that he applied it to this assignment as well. The way it works is that CERMAT has the task checked by independent experts, for example, from an independent expert commission of the Ministry of Education, and then there is a validation commission of CERMAT, where a representative of the Institute for the Czech Language of the Academy of Sciences sits. They all reviewed the assignment and agreed that the assignment was unambiguous, and the question remained there. If it is not, as happened five years ago, and if these independent bodies recognise that the questions are indeed perhaps ambiguously worded, they can strike them out. But they do it in the style that they accept all versions of the answers as correct. The question is then, as it were, crossed out, because everybody who has somehow answered it gets points.
Uniform entrance exams are still, every year, a debated topic, we have them since 2017. Have they been successful?
That's an awfully tricky question. There are probably several groups of education professionals who would answer it differently. We can probably imagine their views here...
I'm sure. CERMAT probably defends it the way it does, right?
Of course, the ministry does too, but they admit some changes, they do not insist on the current form. So if I start with my own opinion, let us say as an independent observer, because I accept the opinions of all possible parties, I think that the principle, the essence of the single entrance examination is good. It is a standardised test, it is the same for everybody, candidates have two attempts and they can try twice to complete the test to the best of their ability. But if we go further, there are a lot of buts. The test questions are specific. It's a specific kind of assignment and you have to prepare for it, you can't completely shoot from the hip, fill in the tests so to speak. You have to put some thought into it, the student has to try a few of these tests to know how to do it.
It's like going to a second school if he's taking some prep classes. But why should he take them if he's going to school and the tests should reflect what he learns in school?
That's right, some schools prepare pupils for it in class, they take tests in class, other schools offer free tutoring after school. And then there are other companies that offer prep...
Costly preparations
Sorry, we have to say at this point, it's not for everyone, some people can't afford it, so some pupils and students may be discriminated against.
It's exactly as you say, and that's what I want to get at. That's the bottleneck, the barrier that's forming. Schools often offer tutoring, but again, it's extra time for the kids, and maybe the kids need to learn how to tact as well. I confess that I don't know to what extent the teachers at school, when filling in tests, are able to prepare the children to choose, for example, in time pressure, only questions that are worth a lot of points and I know I can do them and so on. That's kind of the next level that maybe private companies offer. It's simply become a business and the children of motivated parents are more likely to succeed...
Wealthier parents...
...who have the money to do it.
It should be said that there are plenty of free options for students to prepare for the Common Entrance Exam. These are offered by the National Institute of Education or the Czech School Inspectorate, YouTube channels, webinars, free CERMAT tests from previous years, which pupils can download. However, we know that the best preparation for candidates is provided by commercial projects with experienced tutors and various tricks. When the children can then try the mock exams, they are under time stress, in that classroom, it is in short an exact simulation of the environment in which they will then work.
Of course, the experience will toughen them up, which means they are calmer and their performance is probably better, so unfortunately money is a factor here. This year, the EDUin education information centre produced an analysis showing that children from disadvantaged families are at a disadvantage in the single entrance exam to secondary schools. They are the ones whose parents do not pay much attention to them, do not study with them, do not let them go to tutoring simply because it is not important to them or they do not have the time. These children with some inferior social background would need commercial courses costing seven to nine thousand crowns to be well prepared and competitive, according to EDUin's analysis. It is these disadvantaged, poor families who quite often cannot invest the money because they don't have it, or they don't want to invest it because education is not of value to them.
So for many, the entrance exam and admission to a secondary school to which a child applies can cost seven to nine thousand crowns.
That's right, and I think that's the biggest problem, because education should act as a social elevator. It shouldn't be decided by how much money my family has in the bank, it should be decided by my ability, my diligence, my will to make it somewhere in life, not whether my parents paid for my preparatory courses or not. We know well that people with a high school diploma are more successful in the labour market, they are less unemployed, they have fewer foreclosures, they are less prone to crime, and therefore they are in quotes more beneficial to society, they pay more taxes, so it is also more beneficial for the state if we have more people with a high school diploma.
What are the entrance exams supposed to test?
We have presented your erudite view, because you have long been involved in school issues, and you have also somehow included the opinions of EDUin, or rather their expertise. But the criticism is also directed at what we have also said here, namely that the tests may not test what children learn in schools. So I don't really understand why the questions are directed at something like that, why they are not really directed at the knowledge that children learn in schools...
The exams are not meant to test knowledge. It's a departure from the idea that children should learn something by rote, memorise some years, the order of kings or some elements in chemistry, although it's probably not possible without rote learning. It's more about pupils being able to think critically, to cope with situations, to be able to solve problems, perhaps of the type that the single entrance exam offers. It is meant to test aptitude for learning rather than what children don't cram for in school.
Do schools have the option to tailor the questions in any way? Or is there really going to be a single entrance exam - you fill out these papers, we send them to CERMAT, the Ministry of Education or CERMAT evaluates them, sends them back and we tell you the results. Is it all centrally managed in this way?
Yes, it was put in place six years ago, if I count correctly, to set up some kind of a unified bridge here. Until then, secondary schools did their admissions as they needed to and it was quite chaotic because when a pupil had to prepare for multiple admissions, it was quite often very difficult for them because each school wanted something different. Moreover, it is also quite difficult for secondary schools to prepare new tests every year to discover who should be the best future student for them. That is why the Unified Entrance Examination was introduced, it is compulsory for all secondary schools and it is mandatory to take into account the result of the Unified Entrance Examination of at least sixty percent. Forty per cent of the time, schools can then influence the course of the procedure themselves. However, as Miroslav Hřebecký from EDUin pointed out, in practice this means that in the vast majority of schools the single entrance exam is taken into account from eighty to ninety percent and the rest is usually calculated from the grades in the eighth and ninth grades...
So they just take the report card and look at it...
Or they take into account achievements in Olympiads or international language exams and so on.
But would the school supply some sort of test of its own and calculate the 40 percent from that?
Rather, it's not happening because it's also easier for the schools to make the most of the state exam once it's done.
So there is some criticism from the experts, but at the same time the schools as such, even though they may criticize the tests, may be satisfied because it is not the same job for them as it was before. It's not such a mess, the Education Ministry is defending the single entrance exam, but at the same time saying that it could make some changes in the future. What changes are we talking about?
Taking into account the latest statement from the Ministry of Education, when I asked them to tell me if they were preparing any changes, I was told that, according to the Ministry of Education, "the single entrance exam has proven itself and the system currently appears to be the most advantageous", to quote from the Ministry's press department. The ministry goes on to say that the single entrance exam is perceived by the majority of the professional public and school organisations as being well differentiated and that it fulfils a function, it determines the order of candidates so that the headmaster can decide on their admission, it says that it perceives critical suggestions and that it is constantly trying to improve the quality of the test tasks so that they best suit the knowledge of primary school pupils, it takes into account the framework education programmes, in the old way you would say the curriculum...
... Which are also to be revised, reformed in some way, the Ministry of Education is working on that, or should be.
That's right, and so the test will have to be adjusted, but that will take some time. As far as equal opportunities are concerned, the Ministry of Education argues that the single entrance exam was introduced precisely to create a level playing field. It states that the state provides extensive free support and that if candidates prepare beyond this, the Ministry of Education believes that this is only natural, a clear effort by the individual to compete with other candidates. In short, there is nothing the Department can do about it, but for the Department, the free support a pupil receives in preparation for the entrance exams is sufficient.
Still, some news is coming up, I read something about computerization or that perhaps students could submit more applications?
That could be next year. Electronicisation, digitalisation of applications, because the current system, where applications are made on paper, the papers are filled in in block letters, the application form is sent by post or carried somewhere, is really like King Cluck's time. So, according to the director of CERMAT, this should be different next year and applications should be submitted electronically, but for that we still need to create a register of pupils. This could increase the number of applications to secondary schools from the current two to more, perhaps even unlimited.
So, computerization of applications, not the test, I misunderstood.
Digitization of the tests themselves is definitely on the cards too...
That's the view.
Yes, the ministry wants it, CERMAT wants it, but it takes time and we will probably have to wait a few years for it, but the effort is there.
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