- October 21, 2013
- 221
This year’s exemptions from the exam in Lithuanian withdrawn
Next year, students from Polish and Russian schools are going to take the same exam as the Lithuanian schools’ students – Dainius Pavalkis, Minister of Education informed. Waldemar Tomaszewski called the minister’s words a ‘political bluff’.
‘I’m going to sign the warrant which unifies the exams. The regulation of Gintaras Steponavicius (former Minister of Education) and Valentinas Stundys (former chairman of the parliamentary Committee of Education, Science and Culture) which was in force before changing the exam will stay valid. According to this regulation thanks to the criteria of the exam marking, the disparities between the exams in Lithuanian language in Lithuanian and non-Lithuanian schools’ – said the minister on Monday.
He stressed that the only exemption which will be still valid is a bigger permissible amount of errors. This exemption is to be valid until 2019. The exemption concerning the number of words in an essay will be deleted.
‘This exemption will be deleted because, after a detailed scientific analysis it turned out that this exemption is only formal one. Children from schools for national minorities who passed the exam well and very well have written much more words than the exemption assumed. They have written much broader essays than the students from Lithuanian schools, elaborating on the topic more. Those who tried to stick to the word limit didn’t manage to elaborate on the topic sufficiently and wrote worse essays – stated D. Pavalkis.
For this reason students won’t be able to choose among seven but three or four authors when writing an essay next year. This last exemption was obliged for Lithuanian schools’ students too.
Minister announced that he will sign the regulation on 15 November.
The leader of AWPL (English: Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania), asked by journalists for a comment to the minister’s statement, said: ‘I think that it’s not a hot news but sort of D. Pavalkis’s political bluff to divert attention away from the discussion concerning his standpoint. There was already such discussion at the Labour Party. I think it’s a political step’.
And as W. Tomaszewski added, neither decision of exam exemption ‘can’t be changed by any minister’.
At this year’s Matura exam students from the schools for national minorities took a unified exam in Lithuanian language for the first time. Because of significant differences in the programmes (they had 800 class hours less than their counterparts from Lithuanian schools) there were some exemptions introduced into the exam.
According to them, students from national minorities’ schools were writing an essay 400 words long (250 words at the school exam) instead of 500 (350). All the student, of Lithuanian and national minorities schools’, had the choice between 7 (and not 3) authors when writing their essays. They were allowed to make more mistakes, too.
Tłumaczenie by Elżbieta Szafarz w ramach praktyk w Europejskiej Fundacji Praw Człowieka, www.efhr.eu. Translated by Elżbieta Szafarz within the framework of a traineeship programme of the European Foundation of Human Rights, www.efhr.eu.
