The Matura Reform in Switzerland: Opportunities, Challenges, and Open Questions

The Swiss Academic Baccalaureate is currently undergoing a comprehensive reform and will soon be implemented. Some reflections. Inorder to meet today’s educational requirements, the reform of the baccalaureate is close to implementation. The last reform took place 30 years ago. Depending on the canton, the changes will be implemented by 2029.

To ensure that admission to Swiss universities without entrance examinations remains guaranteed in the long term, the reform pursues several main goals.

The direct access to higher education, without applications and without examinations, is a valuable element that greatly shapes both the attractiveness of the Swiss gymnasium and future educational opportunities in our country.

The so-called “ability to study” of baccalaureate graduates, as well as the requirements in core subjects such as German and Mathematics, are to be strengthened and harmonized.

Furthermore, the reform aims to take into account the requirements of current and future needs. Subjects such as Computer Science, Economics, and Law are to be elevated to the status of core subjects. This will provide students with an even broader education, with 15 instead of the current 13 relevant subjects.

However, expanding the range of subjects may lead to a situation where the depth or significance of individual subjects can no longer be guaranteed to the same degree. Internationally, more and more education systems are moving toward specialization and depth, whereas Switzerland has long been shaped by a strong educational tradition that emphasizes broad knowledge.

But the question arises: even more subjects? Possibly an even greater workload for students. How much pressure is justifiable in the long term? I do not have the answer, but at @schoolfinders we see every day how many students, despite high intelligence, struggle with the workload and the demands. As a result, their true strengths or very specific talents often do not come into play.

One possible compensatory measure to reduce pressure on students could be an extension of the annual promotion system to the final two or even to several years of the short-track gymnasium. A longer assessment period would make it possible to reduce and better distribute performance evaluations across the school year, allow for more diverse forms of assessment, and ease the burden on students as well as (most likely also) on teachers.

Time will tell how much students will benefit from this long-prepared reform or whether, by the time it comes into force, it will already be outdated. We are living through a technological “renaissance,” the extent and consequences of which are neither foreseeable nor measurable.