Start Final Exams

For students who are in the last year of high school, final exams begin on Monday. Besides the tightened examination requirements of last year, there have been some changes for this year’s exams too, especially for HAVO and VWO students. They may only have one insufficient result for the subjects Dutch, English or Mathematics. A total of 207,204 students do their final exam in May. This are 334 more than last year. 109,488 Students are from the VMBO, 57,600 students from the HAVO and 40,116 from the VWO. VMBO students start with French, the HAVO students start with the exam of Management & Organization and the VWO students take the Dutch exam on Monday. HAVO and VWO students may this year have only one insufficient result (5 or less) for the subjects Dutch, English and Mathematics, if they want to pass the exams. At this moment this requirement is not yet raised for the students of VMBO. This requirement comes on top of the 2012 rule of former Minister of Education, which stated that students of VWO and HAVO must have an average of 5.5 for all subjects to pass the exam. The National Aktion Committee Students (LAKS) received last year 123,700 complaints of students about the first exam period. Another 2400 students complained about the retakes. That were much less complaints compared to 2011 (136,000) and the record year 2010 (149,000). Many students of HAVO and VWO took this year a special exam training. According to LAKS, this has probably to do with the new tightened exam requirements. Lotte Savelberg of LAKS sees further that, especially rich parents, send their kids to these trainings. “We fear that this induces a separation among the students,” according to Savelberg Hans Huijbregtse, coordinator of the exam trainings for the University of Leiden, which annually organizes these trainings for 5000 students, says that panic is the main problem for young people. “We give them self confidence en this results in a higher score. Not because of some tricks,” says Huibregtse.