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High school graduate at an exam (archive picture)
Photo: Julian Stratenschulte / picture alliance / dpa
The summer holidays in Hamburg begin on June 24 this year, and there is also a week of Whitsun holidays in May.
"These are two extremely unfortunate vacation dates," says Ties Rabe, the Hamburg school senator: unhappy because they extremely restrict his freedom of action when dealing with the final exams in this particular school year.
Rabe now outlined how he wants to ensure the school examination work and in particular the exams for the Abitur despite Corona and despite the weeks off "on fair terms".
Around 9,500 schoolchildren will take the exam in Hamburg, and 27,000 exams will then have to be assessed.
The procedure in the city-state could also serve as a blueprint for other federal states.
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"Many students have had no regular classes for almost six months," says Rabe.
This year's high school graduates are particularly affected by the exceptional situation.
"That is why we will adjust the examination conditions," announced the SPD politician - and emphasized several times that the measures were coordinated with the Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK), "because we want to ensure that it is a full high school diploma and is recognized everywhere."
"Exams must take place"
The prerequisites for this are clearly defined: "All exams must take place and they must also take place at a proper Abitur level." Nevertheless, there will be modifications compared to the exams in other years, according to the SPD politician.
Specifically, this means:
The processing time for exams is extended by 30 minutes.
For courses with a higher level of difficulty, which are called advanced courses in other federal states, this means an examination time of six hours.
The teachers - and thus indirectly also the students - receive more detailed information on the main topics of the exams.
This enables more targeted preparation, says Rabe, "but the tasks themselves remain secret!"
In the subject of mathematics, teachers are given the opportunity for the first time to make a selection from several possible tasks for their examinees and thus to examine the material previously treated more specifically.
This has long been practiced in other federal states.
The dates for the exams will be postponed by one week, and the first exams will start on April 23.
The last regular exams will be written on May 18th, after which there will be dates for oral exams and opportunities to rewrite.
Another postponement was not possible because of the early summer vacation, says Rabe.
And to restrict the vacation times, he considers "inhuman".
In order to relieve the teachers, the school authorities also want to forego the usual second corrections across the board.
A further assessment is only obtained if the exam grade deviates by more than three grades from the grades previously achieved in class.
Rabe explicitly appealed to the teachers to "take into account assessment leeway" as much as possible when making corrections: In addition to canceled lessons, many students also have absenteeism due to quarantine or self-isolation, which teachers should keep in mind.
Ties Rabe showed no sympathy for demands that the final exams should be waived entirely.
He referred to the past year, when the federal states had carried out the exams after the first Corona shutdown and after some fierce disputes - with great success, as the school senator emphasized: "We had the best high school diploma in the past five years."
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