German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

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German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Kraut » Tue Apr 24, 2018 9:30 am

https://www.change.org/p/kultusminister ... g-unfair-2
https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inha ... 6f682.html


Protest gegen Englisch-Abi
Poetische Beschreibung der Freiheitsstatue bringt Schüler ins Schwitzen

Von Barbara Czimmer

Stuttgart - „Englisch Abitur 2018 Baden-Württemberg unfair!“, so lautet der Titel der Petition, die kurz nach dem Prüfungstermin am vergangenen Freitag im Internet gestartet worden war. Im Lauf des Sonntags stieg die Zahl der Unterzeichner mit jeder Sekunde auf mehr als 25.000 (Stand: Sonntag, 19 Uhr). Die Kritik der Schüler richtet sich gegen die Textform sowie gegen die Aufgabenstellung.


Pflichtkanon war für die rund 33 000 Abiturienten an allgemein bildenden Gymnasien im Land unter anderem der Roman „Half Broke Horses“ von Jeanette Walls; Themenschwerpunkt waren Herausforderungen und Entscheidungen mit dem Fokus auf den USA. Zur Prüfung sei den Schülerinnen und Schülern jedoch ein Text vorgelegt worden, „der sehr schwierig war“, sagt eine 17-jährige Schülerin eines allgemeinbildenden Gymnasiums im Unterland, „so viele Worte musste ich noch nie nachschlagen“. Anders als in den Vorjahren habe man es nicht mit einem Sachtext zu tun gehabt, sondern „mit einem fiktionalen, metaphorischen Text, mit extrem vielen Adjektiven und wenig gängigen Vokabeln“ – einer poetischen Beschreibung der Freiheitsstatue.

In der Petition, die auch sie unterschrieben hat, wird eine Textstelle zitiert: „They were silent. And before them, rising on her high pedestal from the scaling swarmy brilliance of sunlit water to the west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane.“ „Bitte unterstützt die Petition“, appelliert ein anderer Schüler in den sozialen Medien, „auch mein Eindruck war, dass die Abiturprüfung deutlich schwerer war!“
Landesschülerbeirat sieht auffällige Unterschiede

Die Petententen monieren auch, dass das Textverständnis „zum größten Teil auf die Interpretation von Gefühlen und Verhältnissen“ abgehoben habe und diesmal jeweils zwei Zitate als Belegstelle genannt werden mussten statt wie bisher nur eines, die erreichbare Punktezahl jedoch nicht erhöht worden sei. Bei einer weiteren Aufgabe, so die Kritik, sei der zu bearbeitende Abschnitt nicht klar benannt gewesen.

Wie die Deutsche Presseagentur meldete, habe eine Sprecherin des Kultusministeriums am Wochenende eine gründliche Prüfung der Petition zugesichert, äußern wolle man sich dazu allerdings erst später. Auf dem Twitter-Account des Kultusministeriums herrsche am Wochenende Grabesruhe. Der Landesschülerbeirat (LSBR) stützt den Protest der Abiturienten: Es sei auffällig, dass in den vergangenen Jahren bei der Prüfungsaufgabe stets Sachtexte vorgelegt worden seien, diesmal aber ein lyrischer Text, so der Vorsitzende Leandro Karst, man wolle nun die Korrekturen abwarten. Die Abiturienten fordern Susanne Eisenmann auf, „den Erwartungshorizont anzupassen und die genannten Aspekte bei der Bewertung zu berücksichtigen“.
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Iversen » Tue Apr 24, 2018 9:46 am

I may become very unpopular with people in Baden-Württemberg, but that quote is not above what I would expect from an Abiturient.
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Axon » Tue Apr 24, 2018 9:50 am

How many years of English have these students had by the time they take the exam? Do the English courses emphasize literature or non-fiction? Are students encouraged to read English literature outside of school?

I'd say that quoted passage is very flowery language and I can see where the difficulties lie. There's strange word choice like "charred" and "scaling swarmy brilliance." These words have negative connotations, and without more context I can't tell if they're really meant to lend a partially negative sense to the passage.

But on the other hand, the writers of the test might have chosen it specifically to see how well students deal with unknown words in their reading.

Should literature be a required part of foreign-language exams? Does the prominence of English as a technical and business lingua franca mean that mandatory English curricula should focus more on non-fiction to benefit the students?
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Elexi » Tue Apr 24, 2018 10:24 am

The Arbitur is quite literature heavy - from discussing it with my nephew who did it about 5 years ago (who is from Baden-Würtemberg) they were using some quite difficult texts.

However, it is worth comparing the Arbitur to the English A level in German syllabus. The texts for the German A level include books like Kafka's 'Die Verwandlung' and Brecht's 'Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder', so I think a passage from Henry Roth's 'Call it Sleep' (from which the 'They were silent . . . ' quote comes from) is pretty much what one would expect.
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Kraut » Tue Apr 24, 2018 10:37 am

Here is a link to the Kultusministerium server with syllabus examples and recommendations:

http://www.schule-bw.de/faecher-und-sch ... ses/hbh-kk
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Kraut » Wed Apr 25, 2018 3:43 pm


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUvCGXg-YXA

A subtitled interview with Abiturienten, they don't find the exam too difficult overall.
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Kraut » Sat Apr 28, 2018 4:22 pm

Petition on tour, next stop is Saarland:

https://www.change.org/p/ministerium-f% ... angemessen


Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

Die Abiturienten des Saarlandes fanden das Hörverstehen des E-Kurses im Fach Englisch dieses Jahr (2018) unangemessen.

Für das Hörverstehen haben die Schüler insgesamt 30 Minuten Zeit, inklusive fünf Minuten Einlesezeit, vor Beginn des Hörverstehens, um die Prüfungsaufgaben zu erfassen. Dieses Jahr wurde das Hörverstehen in vier Aufgabenstellungen gegliedert.

Die erste Aufgabenstellung bezog sich auf die Meeresverschmutzung und hatte den Titel: "Plastics Don't Disappear, But They Do End Up In Seabirds' Bellies". Der genannte Text beinhaltete viel fachspezifisches Vokabular, dass einem Schüler mit der Englischkenntniss B2, bestenfalls C1, nicht gebräuchlich ist. Zwar war "Pollution" Inhalt des Lehrplans, dennoch wurde sich in diesem sehr kurzen Text rein fachspezifisch geäußert. Außerdem wurde der abgespielte Dialog, im Vergleich zu den Hörverstehen der vorherigen Jahre, relativ schnell gesprochen, weshalb man sich als Schüler nicht dementsprechend auf dieses Anforderungsniveau vorbereiten konnte. Zudem wurden die Anforderungen der Aufgabe zu hoch gestellt, da die meisten Schüler selbst nach der Wiederholung des Gesprächs das gesamte Vokabular in solch kurzer Zeit nicht er fassen konnten, da beispielsweise eine Aufgabenstellung nochmals untergliedert wurde, wodurch man zusätzlich spezifisch unterscheiden musste, welche verlangten Informationen nun aufgefasst werden sollten. Die Aufgaben waren auch zum Teil verwirrend für die Schüler dargestellt, weshalb sie die Aufgabenstellung nicht richtig erfassen konnten. In den letzten Abituren des Hörverstehens konnte man deutlich die Fragestellungen zu dem Gehörten zuordnen. In diesem Jahr war dies nicht der Fall und deshalb konnten viele Schüler ihre Arbeitsblätter selbst nach dem zweiten Hören nicht, oder nur kaum, ausfüllen.


https://www.saarbruecker-zeitung.de/saa ... d-21017861
Saarbrücken. Die Hoffnungen von Englisch-Abiturienten, die Probleme bei der Hörverstehens-Prüfung hatten, haben sich nicht erfüllt. Von Dietmar Klostermann

Die Englisch-Fachlehrer in der Abitur-Korrektoren-Konferenz haben sich am Freitag nicht von einer Petition auf der Internet-Plattform change.org beeindrucken lassen. „Die Schulen sind alle zufrieden, wie die Hörverstehens-Prüfung gelaufen ist“, sagte Marija Herceg, Sprecherin von Saar-Bildungsminister Ulrich Commerçon (SPD) der SZ auf Anfrage. Die Korrektoren-Konferenz habe einstimmig entschieden, dass es keine Notenanhebung geben werde. Viele Englisch-E-Kurs-Schüler hatten bei der Hörverstehensprüfung am Freitag vergangener Woche erhebliche Probleme bekundet. „Die gestellten Aufgaben waren alle in Ordnung“, erklärte Herceg.
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby vov » Sun Apr 29, 2018 6:20 pm

"They were silent. And before them, rising on her high pedestal from the scaling swarmy brilliance of sunlit water to the west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane."

That doesn't seem incredibly difficult considering that a Google search shows that students are expected to be around C1. Here's an excerpt from an exam text from the Danish equivalent of Abitur as a comparison:

"Eight years flying real planes from real cockpits. We gave the drone operators such shit. Called the reach-back crew geeks. Cubicle monkeys. Made fun of their videogame controllers. Their La-Z-Boy command chairs. We tore them apart if they used words like serve, or deployed, or fly. [...] In UAV training we watch footage. A man climbs onto the roof of a building and lights a cigarette. Just like that, four other men join him. A man in an empty lot is holding a tube. Mortar. A man digs in the dirt not eight miles from a US base. There are more than ninety ways to activate an IED. Cell phone. Radio. Pressure plate. Fucking garage-door opener. Beeper. [...] The armed Predator goes in. Lethal fire authorized. Nearest friendlies out of range. Checked. Rechecked. Missiles away. The warehouse flashes bright, the fire starting in a ball then working up, billowing large." (full text at https://intranet.detfri.dk/uvm/fag-stx/ ... angana.pdf)

I took English at the mandatory level ("B-level") and we e.g. read and analysed Hemingway in class. Students who take English as a elective ("A-level") must read authors like Shakespeare.
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Jiwon » Fri May 04, 2018 5:37 pm

Das finde ich echt komisch.

To put this in a more comparative setting, these are some questions from Korean Scholastic Aptitude Test, English Section.

Q. Fill in the blank.

So far as you are wholly concentrated on bringing about a certain result, clearly the quicker and easier it is brought about the better. Your resolve to secure a sufficiency of food for yourself and your family will induce you to spend weary days in tilling the ground and tending livestock; but if Nature provided food and meat in abundance ready for the table, you would thank Nature for sparing you much labor and consider yourself so much the better off. An executed purpose, in short, is a transaction in which the time and energy spent on the execution are balanced against the resulting assets, and the ideal case is one in which ________________. Purpose, then, justifies the efforts it exacts only conditionally, by their fruits.
 
(A) demand exceeds supply, resulting in greater returns
(B) life becomes fruitful with our endless pursuit of dreams
(C) the time and energy are limitless and assets are abundant
(D) Nature does not reward those who do not exert efforts
(E) the former approximates to zero and the latter to infinity

Q. Which option describes the theme of the following text most appropriately?

Sensory-specific satiety is defined as a decrease in appetite, or the subjective liking for the food that is consumed, with little change in the hedonics of uneaten food. As a result of sensory-specific satiety, when people consume a variety of foods, they tend to overeat. A greater variety of food leads people to eat more than they would otherwise. So, being full and feeling sated are separate matters. The recovery of
appetite or the motivation to eat is apparent to anyone who has consumed a large meal and is quite full, and does not require additional energy or nutrients to meet their daily needs, but decides to consume additional calories after seeing the dessert cart. Small changes in the sensory properties of foods are sufficient to increase food intake. For example, subjects who were presented with different shapes of pasta showed increased hedonic ratings and increased energy consumption relative to subjects eating only a single shape of pasta.

① necessity of consuming a varied diet in daily life
② reasons for people’s rejection of unfamiliar foods
③ changes in people’s preference for basic food items
④ impact of food variety on the amount of food people consume
⑤ importance of maintaining food diversity to prevent overeating


Korean students only get 70 minutes to solve 45 of these questions. That's not even two minutes per each question. I have deep respect for the kids who get these questions right, given the fact that it is very difficult to get much exposure to English due the mono-ethnic and monolingual character of the country, and that Korean is very linguistically very distant from English.
Last edited by Jiwon on Fri May 04, 2018 7:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: German students' petition against unfairness of English Abitur exam paper

Postby Josquin » Fri May 04, 2018 6:07 pm

The clue is you're normally allowed to use the OALD (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary) in the Abitur exam (at least I was when I took the Abitur in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2004). So this text really shouldn't be too difficult. I had to interpret a text and questions about the American Dream for the Abitur and in class we had even read Shakespeare. So, this seems like a lot of whining to me.
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