State high schools in northeastern Estonia to hold entrance exams on paper
Seven state high schools (Riigigümnaasium) in Ida- and Lääne-Viru counties have opted to leave aside the state examination information system (EIS) following IT glitches which led to thousands of students in Tallinn being unable to complete their entrance exams last weekend.
Schools in Estonia's northeasternmost counties will instead be holding entrance exams and tests, for the 2024-2025 academic year, on paper.
The state high schools are holding the joint entrance examinations on Saturday, April 20, and have decided not to risk sending over a thousand pupils to the buggy EIS.
The schools say paper-and-pen tests are in some cases more reliable than other online environments too, and not just the EIS.
Teivi Gabriel, director of the Narva State High School, told ETV news show "Aktuaalne kaamera" (AK): "We have a week to go. Tests would need to be transferred to another IT system, entered in, and then we should also manage to conduct some stress testing prior to it."
"This means that right now it's the safer option for us to go ahead with preparing these tests on paper, so that everything will function come April 20," Gabriel went on.
Prior experience and security considerations also support this preference towards paper tests.
Irene Käosaar, principal of another Narva school, the Narva Eesti Gümnaasium, said she was confident of success.
"We'll do just fine. We'll take our regular pens and pencils, hold the tests, and everything will be in order," she told AK.
"This is certain, we know how to evaluate things and it's not complicated, as we do it at the same time; all the students fit nicely into the schools, so it seemed that this was the safest and least fraught option from the student's perspective, in the current situation," Käosaar added.
The Ministry of Education and Research said that paper tests are entirely justifiable under the current circumstances, but added that there is no plan to completely abandon the EIS despite the issues.
Raivo Trummal, head of the state schools department at the ministry, said: "Certainly, in the future, it will be used in exams. When and how exactly that will happen will be determined following a thorough risk analysis of the whole system, once it has been conducted again."
A total of 1,053 students will participate in the joint entrance examinations of the Ida- and Lääne-Viru counties state high schools, competing for 820 places.
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Editor: Andrew Whytem Välner Vaino
