The Bulgarian Telegraph Agency

Over the last ten years half of the applicants seeking admission to Bulgaria`s largest and oldest higher educational establishment, the St Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, have flunked their entrance exams in Bulgarian language and literature and in Bulgarian history. Annually, nearly a quarter of secondary school leavers in this country try their luck at Sofia University.
Examiner panellists blame mainly the applicants` school background for this disastrous performance. Assoc. Prof. Bozhidar Kounchev, who heads the panel checking the exam papers in Bulgarian language and literature, says that secondary-school teachers are grossly underpaid and therefore unmotivated to get deeper into the matter taught and to encourage their pupils to develop their own original thinking. Since training at school is inadequate, pupils are compelled to take private lessons, which turn into a gold mine for many teachers. Quite a few families turn to private schools, assuming that the better pay that teachers there get guarantees a better quality of the education provided to their children.
There are other reasons as well, Assoc. Prof. Kounchev says. The reduced number of Bulgarian classes at school in recent years has resulted in poor training and stereotype handling of literary works. Despite the new textbooks, which are free of dogma and try to instil a more emancipated approach, the overall result is poor because character education is non-existent. `Pupils who lack knowledge, understanding and respect for human values could hardly write something sensible about them`, he argues.
`Character education of uniform-minded people, which is the easiest to achieve and requires the least efforts, produces what Marcuse calls a `one-dimensional person`, Bozhidar Kounchev observes. One of the first steps of such one-dimensional persons is the regimented entrance exam papers with their appallingly identical preludes and conclusions.
The absurdities in the papers, resulting from random uncritical reading, as well as the poor literacy of the applicants, have perpetuated the tendency of 50% or even more failures in the Bulgarian language exam.
Similarly, between 40 and 50% of the candidates fail their entrance exam in Bulgarian history.
The results of the history exams in recent years have been alarming, says Assoc. Prof. Peter Delev, chief panellist and Dean of the University`s History Department. `The exam papers show a low level of training and, generally, of teaching at school`, he adds. Considering that 40% of the applicants for admission to Sofia University are ignorant of Bulgarian history, nearly 80% of all secondary school leavers must be ignorant, too, Assoc. Prof. Delev assumes and wonders what talk there can be at all of national self-identification.
`The off-the-peg papers suggest that the applicants training is an industry, which does not encourage independent thinking`, Assoc. Prof. Delev says.
In recent years, fewer applicants have been sitting for entrance exams in history and litreature and more in mathematics. The results of the maths exams are slightly better, with failures ranging from 30 to 45%.
Mathematics and information science are among the most attractive courses because of the opportunities they offer for further study and work abroad. Almost all members of the Bulgarian national teams in mathematics and informatics get invitations to continue their studies abroad.
Universities meet the increased demand for such courses by increasing the relevant openings.
In a bid to reverse the tendencies of degrading training in Bulgarian language and history, and to update the educational system, the Ministry of Education and Science has launched a reform of the curricula intended to conform them to European standards. These reforms have met with fierce resistance. The critics argue that the pressure to change the otherwise highly rated Bulgarian educational system is coming from abroad and the idea is to ruin the system and thus deprive Bulgaria of one of its few competitive advantages, its highly educated human resources.
The Ministry of Education and Science thinks otherwise. The new Bulgarian curricula for the secondary school envisage a larger number of classes. To cope with rampant illiteracy, Bulgarian language will be studied until the last 12th grade instead of until the 10th, as is the case now. This will make it possible to teach the pupils to speak, write, analyse and interpret texts, the Ministry believes.
Together with revising the proportion of the number of classes in the different subjects, the Ministry has also introduced uniform standards of educational attainment, intended to standardize the level of knowledge, which pupils receive in schools across the country. This is a step towards introduction of mandatory high-school-leaving examinations in 2003, of which one will be in Bulgarian and another in civics. The school-leaving exams will for the first time provide identical criteria to judge pupils' knowledge, the Ministry believes.
One possibility contemplated is for these school-leaving exams to replace the entrance examinations at higher educational establishments. For the time being, the universities object because they fear that the entrance threshold may be lowered. They suggest that the school-leaving exam grades be used as an element of the applicants` qualifying points total.
Some 23.2% of Bulgarians aged between 19 and 23, or a total of 247,006 are attending university this year, the National Statistical Institute found. In tertiary just as in secondary education, enrolment in private establishments is tending up. In most cases, private universities are preferred because they either do not require entrance exams or go through the motions of them, and everything depends on the students` ability to pay for tuition. Which raises the question about the comparability of the level of training that undergraduates studying the same subject at different Bulgarian universities receive.