National School-Leaving Examination in Chemistry – The Chemical Point of View

Abstract

The article reviews the formal and factual aspects of the new secondary school-leaving examination in chemistry at secondary schools in the Czech Republic, which were put into practice in 2011. For the previous evaluation of the tests in the school-leaving examination, valuable findings were found. Here we offer a different point of view. All the accessible tests were rigorously analyzed in terms of the respective chemical issues. The issues were discussed in the context of current secondary-school textbooks and basic chemical paradigms as well as in the context of the formal correctness of tasks in the tests. We found that out of a total of 132 test tasks analyzed, 8 % were not correct from the formal or factual points of view. We consider this fraction as significant and propose possible ways of dealing with the problem.