Minister of Education Mikuláš Bek from STAN outlined the possible future of Czech education in an interview for Radiožurnál. “We will undoubtedly move from tick tests to interactive tasks where the tasks will be solved online,” he described. And he mentioned that artificial intelligence could be used to evaluate exams. In addition, according to him, the final exam in secondary schools might not be uniform.
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9:37 a.m May 2, 2024
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Mikuláš Bek | Photo: René Volfík | Source: iROZHLAS.cz
The state part of the matriculation begins. Didactic tests will be written on Thursday by those who have chosen mathematics or a foreign language, on Friday it is the turn of the didactic test in the Czech language, which is compulsory for everyone. Is everything working as it should? Are the state matriculation exams run by CERMAT according to the rules? Have you had to solve any problems before, such as in the case of submitting applications to secondary schools this year?
No. So far I have no reports of any technical problems. I spoke with the director of CERMAT for the last time on Tuesday. I especially want to wish all the graduates this year the best of luck, because of course graduation is an important moment in our lives, so I hope that the success rate will be high.
This year, it was possible to digitize the admission procedure for secondary schools. Now is it the turn of digitization of matriculation exams? The director of CERMAT spoke about it when he took office a year and a half ago. Is CERMAT working on it?
I have to say we have to start from the beginning. We can’t start graduation from the end. At the moment, work is underway to revise the subject system of secondary schools. This is a completely fundamental change that should lead to the fact that today we have about 280 secondary school subjects and we need to significantly reduce them. In developed countries, there are usually only a few dozen of them.
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This will be followed by a revision of the educational programs for secondary school subjects, which will result in conceptual requirements for the transformation of the exams that stand at the end, including the matriculation. Of course, technology will undoubtedly change, as it will be possible to use artificial intelligence more for evaluation.
There will undoubtedly be big changes to what the tests look like. We will undoubtedly move from tick tests to interactive tasks where tasks will be solved online. But that is a matter of time, of the coming years. But we will undoubtedly experience a big change in the way testing works now.
Your predecessor Petr Gazdík from STAN wanted to introduce two levels of matriculation. The higher one would have to be taken by those who planned to continue their studies, and the lower one would be enough for others. Is this still in the game?
This debate ran in connection with the preparation of the 2030 strategy and we conducted it in various forums. I agree with the basic idea and we’ll see how it resonates in that next environment. That the state should control from the point of view of testing a kind of high school minimum that would really apply to all high school students. They could compose it at any time and repeatedly.
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And in addition, it would open up a space for the baccalaureate to be more specific for different types of schools. I can imagine that we will introduce a secondary school leaving certificate that will really be respected by universities without any problems as a path to university admissions, and in some types of secondary schools a different type of leaving certificate will work for the final exam.
This debate is before us. I think it is legitimate and right that today we return to the fact that the graduation from secondary schools does not have to be one uniform exam for everyone.
This year, less than a fifth of the students, a total of 18 percent, chose the high school diploma in mathematics. From time to time there are proposals to introduce a compulsory high school diploma in mathematics. Is this a topic for the Ministry of Education?
It’s a legitimate topic, of course. These proposals are emerging, different experts, different politicians have different proposals for this. I have to say again, let’s not start from the end, let’s start from the beginning. We have to decide what mathematics we will teach in secondary schools everywhere, to what level, how different types of secondary schools will differ from each other in the difficulty of mathematics.
And from this one can derive a reasonable answer to the question of whether mathematics should ever be compulsory to some extent for gymnasiums, lyceums and vocational schools, or whether the compulsory secondary school minimum, completed long before matriculation, will suffice.
Now I don’t want to anticipate the debate and trivialize it into a decision like Losna or Mažňák. Do you want a compulsory high school diploma in mathematics or are you against it? It’s not that simple. We need to know what the scope of mathematics teaching will be in secondary schools in the future.
Peter the King
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