Bulgaria - Questions and answers

Dear Colleagues from Bulgaria and the Netherlands,

The highly interesting and comprehensive descriptions of your practice concerning graduation from secondary school initiated a vivid debate on our side. Having compared some of your solutions with our experiences, we encountered some additional questions. Your answers to our questions listed below will be a great help in trying to make the conference issues better understood.

First we would like to ask our Bulgarian colleagues for some additional information:

• Entrance examinations for higher education (Issue 1.3): Are they compulsory (besides a "Diploma of secondary education") for all university and non-university programs? If not, for which programs they are obligatory?
• When explaining the "ongoing reforms in the field of secondary education" (Issue 6.1): Will compulsory matriculation examinations be different in their structure from the present ones? If so, what will be the structure of these examinations?

Answer:

Dear Dr. Budin,

Thank you for you interest in the system of secondary education in Bulgaria. In reply to your questions it's my great pleasure to supply the following additional information:

1. Entrance examinations for higher education: In general the requirements for enrolment, depending on the type of the higher school and the subject you are going to read, comprise some form of entry competition as well a Diploma of completed secondary education. In general, these are written competition exams (one or more). However according to Article 21 of the Higher Education Act, the higher education institutions are autonomous to choose admission procedures. Thus they define themselves the requirements for enrolment every year by organising examination competition, documentary competition, tests or a combination of these forms.
2. Matriculation examination: The amendments to the national Education Act foresee (Art.24, point 3) 3 compulsory matriculation examinations. They shall be defined according to the curriculum, but one of them shall be in Bulgarian language and literature. We are actually in a process of elaboration of Rules of procedures concerning the implementation of these amendments.

Hoping this information will be useful to you, I remain

Sincerely yours
Dr. Rossitza Velinova
Equivalence & Information Section
International Relations Department
Ministry of Education and Science
2A, Kniaz Dondukov Bld.
1000 Sofia, BULGARIA
phone/fax (+359 2) 988 49 74