The Dutch language test tests Citoscience and has nothing to do with language skills. The beauty of language has been banned, says Kees Verstappen, graduate candidate at Praedinius Gymnasium in Groningen.

Lost in a jungle of sign words, paragraph connections and argument structures, we final year high school students struggled through the final exam in Dutch this week. Whoever wanders around the world of Cito-makers will inevitably enter into an alternate reality. No copywriter fills out controversy charts or thinks of ‘keywords’. So why do exam makers live in this strange world?

It was once believed that language should become an accurate science. This has various reasons, such as the popularity of science subjects compared to the culture and society “fun package” in secondary education. Additionally, there is a compulsive tendency to objective testing, along with the notion that a written work test – the old article – would not be objective.

Citoma judges canceled the beauty

However, language exists precisely because of subjectivity, ambiguity, and stylistic freedom. It owes its beauty to this. But Citoma judges ditched this beauty and created a new “science” based on “sign words” and “reference relationships”.

Those who pass the Dutch exam only now show that they can analyze texts the way Cito specifies. However, this method is not used anywhere outside of the exam world. So the test simply does not represent actual language skills.

How should it be done? We have to get rid of Cito’s motive to object. It is precisely the great power of language that it is neither clear nor precise. However, we can only use it by leaving the language as it is, and not by squeezing it into the limitations of scientific subjects.

Beautiful literature and article

Get students back to reading! If you collect all the books you need to read to get the complete alpha package and divide it by the six years and 40 weeks of school, a pre-university student should read ten tiny pages each school day. To all materials together. Then I assume the student is reading a book along Terza and not cheese.

Get all those silly homework aimed at preparing for this test with the shredder. Instead, he taught literature and writing skills. Let’s write a nice article more often. What if they’ll do if they get such a task? Look for paper writing help online? Writing skills are necessary. Discuss some good stories in class. This makes your language skills more reasonable.

In short: It is time for education focused on subject matter content rather than Citobureaucracy. It is quite clear that the current exam does not test language skills. Cancel it and teach Dutch as a language, not a science. WF Hermans never mentioned “referral relationships” either.

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