The original article requires translation.
The government proposal for the National Baccalaureate, which will be utilized with the new digital technologies now available to the Greek state, is presented by Minister of State Akis Skertsos in an article in Sunday’s Kathimerini.
Specifically, according to the government proposal:
High school exams are not increasing. The way they are conducted is only changing .
All topics for the promotional exams will be drawn from a Bank of Graded Difficulty Topics and will be accompanied by a grading guide.
Everything is open and available to everyone, without the surprise of unknown topics.
To ensure the validity of the process, students’ writings can now be digitized and stored in a repository, while an external body of experienced graders can carry out sample checks.
All with rules, with artificial intelligence support , and open to students and parents.
As happens in every other country that implements similar systems.
The performance of all three grades can be taken into account in the National Baccalaureate grade , so that a child’s future is not judged in a three-hour exam, as is the case today, but also without the school becoming an examination center.
Quarterly grades can also be “corrected” based on the final written performance, in order to limit any arbitrariness of the oral examination.
We want every day at school to “count”. A little, but to “count”.
The institutionalization of a more valid, reliable and impartial evaluation system in high school is now ripe.
With the new system of administration, pedagogical supervision and evaluation of schools and teachers.
166 new curricula are already ready , new books , digital material and interactive whiteboards in every classroom, more trained teachers.
When its implementation is complete, in a few years, the National Baccalaureate may make the Panhellenic Examinations unnecessary .
But this is not the case at present and will not be the subject of the dialogue that will begin immediately.
Today’s high school diploma
Akis Skertsos, criticizing today’s high school diploma, states the following:
Did you know that the Greek high school diploma is not accepted by countries like Germany?
Or that important foreign universities do not recognize it as a reliable certificate of knowledge and skills of our children?
If you’re wondering why, one answer may be that the “excellent” grades often listed on high school diplomas (one in four graduates graduate with honors), translate into grades below or around the base 10 in the National Examinations. Thus, making the high school diploma a worthless piece of paper.
The operation of the Lyceum
Regarding the current operation of the Lyceum, the Minister of State comments:
It is also a common secret that many students exhaust their absences, effectively abandoning high school in their final years. Quite simply because they devote all their energy to private lessons and tutoring.
As well as the fact that many Greek families are “bleeding” financially to offer their children the best they can in the form of additional remedial teaching in a weak high school.
The most important problem, however, is that in an era when artificial intelligence is now directly competing with human intelligence and the need for general education and critical thinking is returning to the forefront as a fundamental mission of education, Greek high schools are finding it difficult to meet this goal.
These figures are not recent data.
They have been accumulating as pathologies, especially of high school education, for decades.
The political system is discussing these things, but it doesn’t dare to do so yet.
The time has come to talk about the “elephant in the room” , which is none other than the fact that we have collectively allowed, for decades, high school to be transformed into an examination hall for only four subjects.
We have come to terms with a reality that says it is okay for our children to be “passers” from high school, depriving them of critical general education knowledge, absolutely necessary for their social and academic formation as well as their individual maturation.
High school has not only lost its way as a general education institution. Research shows that it has also lost its ability to function as a mechanism for social mobility and advancement for the less privileged, as it did for decades.
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