The national-level external evaluation tests in Bulgarian literature and grammar for 4th and 5th graders, held on May 13 2008, were conducted amid lots of organisational problems.

According to Roman Bratoev, headmaster of SS Kiril and Metodi secondary school in the village of Murchaevo near Sofia, the organisation involving the conducting of tests could have been better.

As The Sofia Echo reported on May 12 2008, headmasters were given CDs with the tests in advance, but without the password for accessing them. The password was supposed to arrive via e-mail 30 minutes before the start of the tests at 10am.

“We never got such an e-mail and we had to call to Sofia to get the password on the phone. Other schools could not get their password, so I had to fax them pages of the tests,” he said. Such was the case with the school in Vladaya neighbourhood. “It was chaos”.

“I don't see why the password could not be announced on the radio as they do with the university admission exams”.

“For bigger schools in the big cities conducting the tests it was probably not a problem, but I don't even want to imagine what must have been the situation in schools from smaller towns and villages,” he noted.

According to him, there were no instructions on how children had to fill in the tests. “We could not tell them whether they had to put crosses, dots or any other sign”.  

“We haven't received any complaints from schools having problems in opening the CDs," a spokesperson for the Education Ministry told The Sofia Echo. As for the lack of instructions, the ministry said that headmasters had nothing to complain about because they were given the instructions days in advance.

The tests on May 12 are the first in a series of six examinations that 4th and 5th graders will have to take this year. The tests for 5th graders were introduced last year, while 4th graders will be examined for the first time. The other tests include examination in mathematics (May 14), natural sciences (May 15), history of civilisation (May 16), geography (May 17) and a foreign language (May 20).