Vse fewer students are taking the 12th-grade math exam, analysis from the latest newsletter from the Institute for Market Economics shows. They are already below 3% of all high school graduates, despite the key importance of the discipline for more and more job positions in the labor market, analysts note. For high school students, the matriculation exam in Bulgarian language and literature is the only mandatory one. The second is by choice, and children have recently been choosing a language en masse.
This year, only about 1,400,000 students, or 2.9% of all matriculates, took mathematics classes - a visible drop of about 18% compared to last year, especially against the background of the increase in the total number of students who took the DZI. These students are also highly territorially concentrated – in only 51 of the country's 265 municipalities, but mostly in large cities with strong specialized mathematics schools – 400 graduates in the capital, 156 in Varna, 76 in Plovdiv.
On this background, the ratings are relatively high – average for the country Very good (4.91), and Gotse Delchev, Dolni Dabnik and Burgas are ranked first. As expected, small municipalities with several occurrences have the highest result (but also the most unstable), but large cities also perform well – Burgas, Vratsa, Sofia, Gabrovo.
The gradual withdrawal of mathematics from the matriculation exam has a clear explanation – fewer and fewer students, especially outside elite, specialized schools, feel prepared to take the exam, the institute notes. This, however, is evident from the large gap in achievement between the seventh and twelfth grades – in the seventh, where mathematics is compulsory, the results are much lower than those in BEL, and in the twelfth, where it is not, they are significantly higher, writes "Sega".
The lack of interest in mathematics, however, threatens to become an obstacle to building not only personnel specialized in “exact" sciences, but also in a much wider range of professions requiring a sufficiently good command of mathematical knowledge and skills, which the economy will increasingly need. Visibly increasing both the interest and the quality of mathematics education at school is an extremely necessary and overdue measure, which the authorities still do not reach, analysts comment.