High School graduation exam in Finland is big. Each year, tens of thousands of students across the country take part in total of around 200 000 sessions, with the majority sitting the test during the spring period. The digitally conducted exam holds huge significance for each and every one of them, as a system failure could force students to delay, or even abandon, their hopes for higher education.
Exam driving school digitalisation
The Finnish Matriculation Examination has been fully digital since 2019. The shift aimed to better assess students’ IT skills and allow for more varied testing formats across subjects. But no off-the-shelf solution met these needs, so YTL, the agency governing the organisation and execution of the exam, developed its own. The result was Abitti, a Linux-based platform introduced in 2015. Its impact quickly went beyond the exam hall.
“When exams were done with pen and paper, schools didn’t have much incentive to use digital tools in teaching. But once the government decided that the matriculation exam would be digitalised, the situation changed. Now every student has a laptop in their backpack”, says Matti Lattu, the product owner of Abitti at YTL.
“If the goal was to digitalise upper secondary education, well, that’s exactly what happened”
Seven years on, YTL faced a new challenge, when problems with chosen technology become evident and the trend was growing. As the software still ran from a USB stick, schools were growing increasingly frustrated with the logistics and managing the hardware, ensuring compatibility, and dealing with the quirks of various system versions fall out of the scope of high school IT administrators. It was time for an update.
Teachers and students in the loop
An examination system might not seem as complex as those used in healthcare or e-governance, but what makes the system particularly demanding is that it must function flawlessly for all students at the same time, across a wide range of subjects from biology to mathematics and beyond.
“The selection of supplementary applications used in an exam has always evolved, but now that we're moving to a different technology, the tools are changing”, explains Lattu.
Some of the exam applications are also used in teaching, which adds pressure on teachers to keep up.
“Especially in science subjects, this worries teachers: how will they learn to use the new tools? Change is always heavy and for a group of teachers, it's a big deal”.
From the examinee’s perspective, the stakes are high. Finnish universities and other higher education institutions increasingly consider matriculation results when selecting applicants. Students spend months preparing, and a technical failure could delay their plans by up to a year. Worse still, it could mean missing the once-in-a-lifetime moment of graduating alongside their peers. This challenge is addressed with a continuous feedback loop.
“There are over 2 million answer papers annually from practice exams and our system is used every day. As soon as we publish a new version, we get immediate feedback”.
Abitti 2 is not yet fully open sourced, but the components are opened gradually as they reach sufficient maturity. According to Lattu, opening the source code potentially increases the system’s reliability.
“We don't know what the outcome will be, but it could take things to the next level. We might even get feedback about the code itself.”
The new Abitti 2 system is built on a fully open-source browser engine. While the Matriculation Examination Board acknowledges that moving to browser-based exams increases their own support workload, as they must now accommodate multiple operating systems rather than just one, the shift offers schools greater flexibility. In turn, this can save taxpayers money by allowing schools to choose from a wider range of computers and IT equipment.
Open for collaboration
Abitti’s use isn’t limited to the matriculation exams. The Board has held discussions with universities and other higher education institutions about using the system for entrance tests as well. Effectively following the “Public Money, Public Code” principle, they are making the system openly available, so others can benefit from it, adapt it to their needs, and contribute to its development.
“Opening the code is a statement: we are open, and we have no hidden agenda”, says Lattu.
“Since we wrote the code with public funds, it doesn’t bother us to share it. It’s not taking anything away from us. And maybe someone will notice that the code is open source and think, ‘let’s get in touch’, and then a collaboration might emerge.”
