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Reflecting on my Abitur exams

2024-05-18

I can't fully believe it, but I have had my Abitur exams and my school time is basically over with only the graduation day itself left. With that background, I think it is time to reflect a bit on how my written as well as oral Abitur exams went and give you some tips from my humble position. Like many of my articles, this is a rather niche topic, but feel free to stick around and learn a bit about the obstacles of the German Abitur...

Let's start off by disproving a common myth: The Abitur and your final grade doesn't only consist of your 5 final exams - instead these really only make up one third of the final grade with the other two thirds being the result of your year 12 and 13 marks. This means that while the final exams are important for sure, the real foundation of your final grade is built in the time before the Abitur and not with the final exams. While some people might prefer only preparing for 5 exams, I highly appreciate this system since it encourage consistent good performance over single-time excellence and also allows you to somewhat fail an individual exam without your final grade being highly influenced.

With that out of the way, here is how the final exams themselves work. Before attending year 12, you have to choose a spezialization (languages, social sciences, STEM or arts) including three so-called Leistungskurse, which are more intense courses in certain topics with more time per week (5 instead of 3 lessons) compared so-called Grundkurse (GKs) that you just attend because you have to, and two so-called Prüfungskurse (PKs), which are regular Grundkurse in which you also have Abitur exams. The three LKs (short for Leistungskurse) have to be arranged into P1 to P3, which will have a 6 school hour long written exam (usually 300 minutes), and the two PKs have to be arranged into P4 and P5. This numeration is important, since P1 and P2 contribute twice as much to your final grade as the other Ps, P4 is a written shorter exam and P5 is your oral exam. Quite a lot to keep in mind, I know. Here is what I chose:

The first three topics are the primary ones I'm interested in, so that already was a good fit, and P4/P5 were basically chosen, because I have to do a language and social science and these two appeared to be the least painful ones. Looking back, I can only highly recommend my choice for STEM interested individuals, but feel the need to share a word of conscience about the math LK. Besides history it regularly has the worst exam grades and is known to be rather hard, which I can only confirm. For me personally it was all fine, but my understanding of math and logical correlations is also somewhat above average and I know quite a lot of people, who excelled at math before, but barely managed to get through the LK.

Regarding the specific Abitur exams I wrote, I have to say that physics and computer science were really easy with a managable length in both cases. As with all written exams you could choose between at least two different sets of exercises and thus had the chance to avoid areas you don't like or studied less for. Computer science always includes quite a lot of real world scenarios, so choosing an exercise there almost always comes down to personal preference, but physics is pretty consistent with waves, interference and electromagnetic fields bascially always being relevant. Personally, I was able to choose exercises I was interested in and immediately had ideas how to solve, which made these two exams actually rather fun and staight forward.

Next up was my English exam, which sadly wasn't so fun, but still fair and managable. The listening and mediation parts were really easy this year, on which all the people I talked to agree. But the writing exercises, which make up most of the exam, weren't so easy. You could choose between an excerpt from a novel and a newspaper article, which in concept is nice, since different people prefer different kinds of texts. But this year the excerpt was so much shorter and easier to work with than the article that even I who hates working with fictional texts chose it. Thus working through the exercises wasn't fun at all, but at least it was still clear what to do. Luckily enough, the math exam, which was my final written one, turned out to be just in line with physics and computer science. The manual part without a calculator was really fair this year, even providing exercises from all three areas touched in school (analysis, stochastics and analytic geometry) to choose from. The longer part during which we had access to our calculators was significantly harder, but thanks to the ability to choose between exercises again, still managable for me and interesting.

Overall, the written exams went way smoother than I expected and showed me that good preparation really is key for them. I'm in a fortunate position of course, but I feel like they really were fair for everyone - you just shouldn't take them too easily in terms of the time to spend learning. This leads me to the oral exams I took in politics, which is much shorter (20 minutes preparation + 30 minutes exam interview), but still went well. In the beginning, you are guided into the preparation room, where you are presented with a material, which you have to summarize, put into context and ultimately judge in some aspect or another. You then have to present your results in a 10 minute monologue, before being roasted in the following interview, which also connects to different topics and really tests your knowledge of the topic. Sadly my exam was about international conflicts, which is the one topic I really dislike - still know about, but just dislike. Just like in English, this made the exam a not-so-fun ride, but I still managed to show off my knowledge and connected to the topics I like wherever I could, which is propbably the reason it got the maximum score of 15 points for it ;)

I still don't know the grades of my written exams, but I'm in good spirits and looking forward to receiving them. The main point of this article isn't to flex with how (hopefully) well my Abitur exams went, but to make a point that these exams really aren't something characterized by fear and horror. Yeah, they aren't easy, but they are doable and if you already made your way to the Abitur, you are more than capable enough to write these exams and go over the finish line. With that said, have a lovely day and we'll hear from eachother next week...

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