In early November, around 17,000 students were scheduled to take a practice test on the Swedish National Agency for Education's testing platform, as a test ahead of widespread digital national exams next spring. However, a number of schools reported login problems and system slowness.
The turmoil led to the Swedish National Agency for Education deciding that the upper secondary school's digital exams in Swedish and English should be replaced with paper exams. And now the Swedish National Agency for Education is taking another step and replacing the upper secondary school's digital national exam in mathematics (levels 1a, 1b, 1c) on December 16 with paper exams. The reason is that the agency is still analyzing what went wrong in the practice exam.
The Swedish Teachers' Union now wants the government to pause the project until the Swedish National Agency for Education's platform is fully functional.
We teachers want digital national exams, but not under these dysfunctional circumstances. The digital platform must work before it can be fully put into use, says the union's chairwoman Anna Olskog to Vi Lärare.
Also this spring, digital exams had to be canceled after students' personal data was leaked to other schools.
Since 2017, the Swedish National Agency for Education has been tasked with developing and preparing for digital national exams.
