Ali je matura dozorela? Biologija na maturi

The article offers some thoughts on the matura in general and gives details of the biology matura over the last ten years. The "old matura " before the introduction of career-oriented education did not considerably differ from the new matura with respect to knowledge requirements, but it did differ with respect to the aims it strove to achieve and the goals it served. With Slovenia s independence and the educational reforms there appeared a legitimate requirement for the introduction of an external examination of knowledge in the form of a national matura, which would unify the preparation, supervision and implementation of the matura for the whole country. The matura thus became a fairly complex project with clearly defined rules, procedures and deadlines that had to be adhered to unconditionally. Among the basic criticisms of the matura is that it has become a means for acquiring the points necessary for enrolment at a particular faculty. The matura has become a synonym for the successful or unsuccessful education of an individual student. A positive point, on the other hand, is that the new matura has set fairly unified criteria of assessment, which in turn unified the knowledge requirements for students coming from what are sometimes very different schools. The members of the Subject Commission for Biology spend a great deal of time on writing suitable and clear questions, which require precise answers so that it is not difficult to mark them objectively. The number of students deciding on biology for matura has always been around 1.100 (comparable with chemistry and physics). Unfortunately, university teachers are finding that the knowledge of the students who did a matura exam in biology and then enrolled to study biology or microbiology is often rather poor. The reason may lie in an excessive mass of data which students are not capable of combining into a meaningful whole and partly in the fact that often too much importance is placed on the matura itself.