In principle, the Central Matura did not lead to less successful completions than the previous school-leaving examination prepared individually by the class teacher. This is the conclusion reached by Regina Radinger, Head of the Population Directorate, at the presentation of the Statistics Austria publication “Education in Figures 2021/22”.
Rather, with the standardized matriculation and diploma examination, the successful degrees were postponed to a later date. Since then, high school graduates have often needed several attempts to pass the matriculation examination, or they only take their first exam later.
The introduction of the central Matura, which, among other things, was intended to improve the comparability of degrees through centrally prescribed exams, led to a slump in the success rates for the main dates in 2015 (AHS) and 2016 (BHS). After a peak of 88.8 percent in 2013/14, it fell to 78.2 in 2017/18. According to the statistics, they rose again significantly with the coronavirus-related relief.
However, if you also take into account the additional dates in autumn and winter, the drop in success rates due to the introduction of the central Matura is significantly lower (2013/14: 95.3 percent, 2017/18: 90.9).
