After the postponement of the high school exams due to a technical breakdown in North Rhine-Westphalia, the NRW school minister Dorothee Feller has been criticized. She invited to a press conference on Wednesday. Only a “press conference on the central high school diploma” was announced – the CDU politician did not address the massive breakdown in the invitation. The high school exams planned for Wednesday in North Rhine-Westphalia had been postponed to Friday at short notice due to massive technical problems on Tuesday evening.
Many teachers in the schools had waited until the evening for the exam tasks to be downloaded, until it was finally canceled. “Some of the students and teachers are really angry,” said Sabine Mistler, state chairwoman of the North Rhine-Westphalia Association of Philologists.
“We expect reliable and fast communication from the ministry instead of having the teachers wait in the schools until well after 7 p.m.,” said a spokesman for the GEW union. Many teachers are now worried. The school minister’s “poor communication” was dramatic, said the SPD school expert for the opposition SPD, Jochen Ott, of the “Aachener Zeitung”.
“The disruption and short-term postponement of the high school exams is extremely annoying,” the CDU politician had admitted. After all, the high school graduates prepared intensively for their exams. However, the technical fault prevented the examination tasks from being downloaded, so that the schools could not get the tasks on time.
The examination subjects biology, chemistry, nutrition, computer science, physics and technology were affected. The nationwide download for schools was opened by the ministry at 12 noon on Tuesday. But it didn’t work for many schools.
The ministry will “work through the disruption intensively” together with the external service provider, the minister promised. It is about “drawing the necessary conclusions so that the tests can be carried out without problems on the following days”.
The President of the NRW Teachers’ Association, Andreas Bartsch, criticized in the “Rheinische Post” (Wednesday) that the Ministry of Education had changed IT service providers and that many headmasters were upset that there had been no test run for the download. The change of service provider also took place without the participation of school representatives, and the repeated reference to testing the system at an early stage was ignored.
The youth organization of the FDP, Junge Liberale (July), called on the state government to create clarity. “If it turns out that the ministry was not adequately prepared, you have to say clearly that ministers have resigned for less,” said state chairman Alexander Steffen in the evening.
Mistler from the philologists’ association also demanded that it should now be examined very thoroughly what caused the problem. Because on Wednesday the download for the regular Abitur exams on Thursday begins again.
Postponement notice
