A tense few weeks lie ahead for Dutch high school students. The final exams start today for 211,550 high school kids in the Netherlands, RTL Nieuws reports.
VMBO pupils are kicking off the exams with English and Dutch on Monday. HAVO pupils are starting with physics, and VWO pupils have mathematics on the agenda.
The final exams end on May 29th with more exotic language subjects like Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish. Frisian is also on the program for the last day of exams.
Dutch girls in HAVO, VWO and MBO increasingly chose to study in a technical direction, though the increase is minimal in VMBO and higher education, Statistics Netherlands reported on Thursday.
An 18-year-old girl from Breda will not get higher marks on her French exam after she challenged the results in court, the court in Utrecht ruled on Monday, Omroep Brabant reports.
The VWO student scored 0.05 points too few on one question to pass the French exam, and thereby also failed her diploma. The French exam was already under fire due to a number of mistakes.
An 18-year-old girl who just barely failed a VWO exam, is challenging the outcome of her French exam in court. If she got only 0.05 of a point more on one answer, she would've passed and gone to university, according to her lawyer Wilco Brussee, AD reports.
Nearly all the high school students on the pre-university level (VWO level) passed the mandatory mathematics test. The preliminary results show that 97 percent achieved a 5 or higher, which counts as a pass. The final results will be announced after the summer, the Ministry of Education announced on Tuesday
About 210 thousand high school students in the Netherlands are starting their final exams this week
The number of students in high school education increased from 13 thousand in 1900 to almost a million today, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) revealed on Thursday. Currently, 80 percent of the Dutch population between the ages of 12 and 18 are enrolled in a secondary school. The current percentage has largely held over the course of the last four decades.
Some 200,000 pupils in the Netherlands will be taking final exams in the next two weeks. For havo students, today's agenda consists of Art and Management & Organization. For vwo students, the exam Dutch is today. Vmbo-students only start tomorrow.
Young people who do not yet have a diploma will be obligated to go to school until their 21st. This is a plan from the PvdA and the CDA who have proposed a bill that will raise the school-leaving age from 18 to 21 years.
On the first day of the final exams for the high schools, National Action Committee Students (LAKS) has received more than 21,000 complaints. This was published on their site for complaints. The VWO Dutch exam received most complaints, a staggering 15,000.
“The subject Dutch seems to be again the problematic one. The students thought it was unclear and difficult. The same happened last year,” a spokesman of LAKS said.
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.
Although primary school pupils in the rural areas score better in standardized testing and get better school references than city school children do, they often choose to go to secondary education. This is one of the conclusions of the report De Dorpenmonitor of the Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP), which was presented on Thursday.
