The high school exams are now assessed according to their level – the 'optimal' gets a lower factor, and the 'highest' gets a higher value. A woman who graduated from school some years ago said on Twitter that her assessment of 86% in math will now be counted as 65%. As a result, there is little hope for her in the budget seats. Another woman writes – this means that the results of all exams taken until 2022 (inclusive) are artificially reduced from 100% to 75%.
Liene Voroņenko, head of the State Educational Content Center, said that the new arrangement with different values of the degrees of difficulty is fair to the applicants.
According to the Latvian Student Union, such arrangements are unfair to those who took a break after high school.
“It certainly will have a bad impact on the availability of their studies. Maybe then they will think they should not go back to higher education, if their exams [..] will now only have a 0.75% impact on the results of admissions,” said Liene Levada, president of the Latvian Student Union.
Universities said that there will certainly be challenges, but they "are ready".
“We're ready. We've figured out an algorithm for how we'll calculate. Also for budget seats. We have clear rules. There will be a start of admissions and there may be some issues, but surely the biggest issue will be when the results of the exams are known,” said Uģis Citskovskis, director of the Education Department of Riga Technical University.
But are there concerns that graduates of this year will steal all the budget seats?
“We will be able to see this objectively after the competition concludes and we will see how these results are shaped,” said Jānis Saulītis, director of the University of Latvia Studies Service Department.
Universities will begin to accept applications on July 14.
