Ok, so I live in Romania, Central-eastern Europe, a country inside the EU.
So first, some background, in our country you go to highschool, then at the end of it, so at the end of grade 12, when you're 18-19 years old usually, you are given an exam. This exam consists of:
-a written test for romanian language/your native language if you're a minority
-an oral test for romanian language/your native language if you're a minority
-a written test for a foreign more spread language, like English, French, German, Spanish, you get the picture.
-an oral test for another foreign language that is more spread in the world.
-a written test for either History(of Romania mostly) or Geography (of Romania mostly)
-a written test to some other stuff, you can either chose the one from history of geography you didn't chose, but this time for Europe, phychology, sociology, biology, chemistry and a few others.
Now to pass you need the average of the notes from all these tests to be at least 6 out of 10.
Last year over 30% of all students who went to this exam (about 10% of all the students that should have went didn't even show up) failed it. Now this is because of multiple reasons, including, but not limited to: the fact that our education system changed how it works almost every year, the fact that teachers aren't payed enough, the fact that teachers themselves fail their tests yet they're still kept on post, the fact that there aren't enough teachers, the fact that some teachers don't care and nobody cares to check, the fact that some parents are out of country and the relatives taking care of the children don't give them as much attention, the fact that the children themselves are some kind of rebels thinking they're smart anyway, who cares about a diploma etc. All this stuff happened in the last 15-20 years since education was a subject for test for all politicians that came to power and the parents had to work more because... well we're a poor country with low salaries.
So the Gouvernment has thought that there's too many subjects and too hard for our children and decided to remove some: they want to remove the last subject and written Romanian or maternal language(the subjects will exist, as they say, in oral examination). So, in the face of 30% failed rate last year, do you think it's a good thing to to to lower the needed requirements to pass? Would you agree with something like this if this happened in your country(I don't care how smart your children are, hypotetically this year 30% of the students in your country fail a similar exam in this scenario)?
Edit: So a few hours after making this thread I watched the news... and seems the ministers in my country changed their mind(again) today. Seems they decided that from now on the subjects will be like this:
- a written test for romanian language(or I presume maternal language)
- an oral test for romanian(or I presume maternal language)
- an oral test for a foreign language at choice
- digital competences (this is stuff like Microsoft Office Basics)
then the sciences high schools get:
- a subject in maths
- a subject combined of chemistry, biology and physics
and the humanistic high schools get:
- a written subject in foreign language
- a subject combined of history, geography and socio-human studies
and the tech high schools get:
- a giant subject with everything ever learned
I don't even know what to say now... they go from one extreme(cutting subjects) to merging all and giving questions about biology and physics in same test for example? And don't the science people need to know how to write in a foreign language? Only speak it?