Monitoring Educational Standards

In 2003 and 2004, Germany’s Standing Conference of State Ministers of Education and Culture (KMK) issued a set of educational standards for primary and early secondary education applicable to all of the country’s 16 states. In 2012, the KMK set educational standards for Germany’s general matriculation qualification.

The aim of the educational standards is to contribute to quality development and quality control in the German education system. They therefore define the competences that students should have developed by a certain stage in their school career.

Since 2006, the Institute for Educational Progress (IQB) has regularly conducted nationwide comparisons across the federal states to test whether and to what extent these learning goals are being attained. The test questions developed for this purpose are trialed beforehand by way of pilot studies.

In addition, standardization studies are carried out with the aim of determining the level of difficulty of the tasks using representative samples. Based on the results of the standardization studies, competency-level models can also be developed that provide a uniform basis for classifying students' performance. 

Numerous new digital test items were piloted in the subjects of German and mathematics as part of the 2024 primary school pilot study.

The secondary school pilot study begins in 2025. Digital test items in German, English, and French subjects will be piloted during the year at approximately 200 schools (including 25 special needs schools). The 2025 pilot study is taking place in eight federal states (Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Hessen, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, and Saxony-Anhalt).   

Further information about the educational standards is available at KMK and IQB.