The minister said she had mixed feelings about this year’s school-leaving exams.
“I am pleased about good achievements, which there are many, including exam results in physics, chemistry, history, geography, the Lithuanian language and literature. However, poor mathematics exam results this year are particularly worrying, and they have been deteriorating consistently for a long time,” the minister said in a press conference.
“35% of those who took maths [exam] have not reached the satisfactory level, or to put it simply, they have failed the exam. This indicates that the situation is bad and the issue is too serious to talk about it spontaneously,” she added.
According to the minister, maths is in crisis and poor exam results is the outcome of decisions made a long time ago or decisions that had not been made altogether.
Asked whether the mandatory maths exam was going to become optional again, the minister said this would not happen and the problem had to be addressed instead of being avoided. She argued that schoolchildren needed more help to better prepare for the exam.
School-leaving maths exam results were initially announced on 7 July but it transpired that more than a third of school students failed it. The minister immediately asked for an additional assessment and it was officially confirmed several days later that 35% of school-leavers failed the exam.
A commission dispelled doubts that tasks were too difficult. It compared exam tasks required to meet the minimum requirements in 2020-2022 and concluded that the high percentage of failed exam was not linked to the difficulty of tasks because they were similar.
The commission could neither confirm nor deny that exam results might have been affected by lockdowns due to COVID-19.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Sport also noted that in cities 27.7% of school students failed the exam, compared with 40.1% in rural areas.
