Students begin written exams

17 May 2006

AMSTERDAM — Almost 200,000 students begin taking written exams in three streams of secondary education in the Netherlands on Wednesday.

There are around 700 secondary schools in the Netherlands, both publicly and privately run. Secondary education covers schools providing pre-university education (VWO), senior general secondary education (HAVO) and pre-vocational secondary education (VMBO).

The majority of the students (113,000) are sitting exams for their VMBO certificate. Another 49,000 are completing the HAVO stream and 34,000 are hoping to graduate from the VWO stream.

All the schools taking part in the exams offer the possibility of completing many of the exams by computer. From next year the use of computers will be obligatory for physics in the VWO and HAVO streams and combined sciences at the higher VMBO level.

The intention is that all students will get to use a computer during at least one subject.
Students at 100 VMBO schools are sitting their exams for general subjects at the lower level completely by computer this year. The computers even calculate the pupils’ final score. Teachers and examiners will only get involved if a doubt about an answer arises.

A total of 196,000 students are sitting second-level exams this year, two thousand more than in 2005. The first exam on Wednesday was Russian. The last exam is on 2 June.

Subject: Dutch news