Brandenburg’s schools will receive their Abitur assignments digitally for the first time this year. With a circular from October 2022, the Potsdam Ministry of Education specified the digital distribution of the Abitur tasks in the subjects mathematics and French in the basic and advanced courses as well as for the subjects geography, political education and history in the basic courses.
And as can be seen from the state government’s response to a small question from Ilona Nicklisch, member of the state parliament (BVB/Freie Wahler), the ministry apparently does not want to leave anything to chance. Because in the past few years there had been several mishaps in the Abitur exercises: Unforgotten is the math Abitur of 2017, which had to be copied by 2800 students because the material for a logarithm problem had not previously been dealt with in class.
Dress rehearsal for the exam day
That is why there was now a very official dress rehearsal for the exam day at the Brandenburg grammar schools and community schools: As the Ministry of Education informed the deputies, a so-called “test print” took place in the Brandenburg schools on January 10th. “As a result, it can be stated that the schools were able to download the test print within the specified time window and were able to decrypt and print out the files contained therein,” the ministry said.
In the age of digitization, Brandenburg’s schools have practiced receiving an encrypted file by email, decrypting it and printing it out. According to the answer to the small request, the Ministry of Education and the State Institute for Schools and Media Berlin-Brandenburg (Lisum) even provided support. This also worked.
The answer does not reveal how often there were soft curses in the teachers’ rooms and rectorates and how often the phones at Lisum rang during the “test print”. However, there were no difficulties with the “password query in the company mailbox in the schools or with the decryption of the ZIP file with the transmitted password”. The test print was implemented “without any problems”, and the test prints of the Abitur assignments were also completed in “correspondingly good print quality”.
However, curious high school graduates need not hope that the digital distribution of tasks could make it easier to get to the tasks before the exams. “During the printing process, only the presence of the examination chairperson and the respective teaching staff is permitted,” says the answer. And after the exam tasks have been printed, they would be kept “as usual in a secure place (safe)” and then made available to the examinees.
