The entry-level swimming badge in Germany is the Seepferdchen, the seahorse. The requirements are fixed. The child jumps in from the edge of the pool and swims 25 meters, brings up an object from shoulder-deep water with the hands, and knows the pool rules. The German Life Saving Association, the DLRG, adds a warning. Das Seepferdchen ist noch kein Nachweis des sicheren Schwimmens. The seahorse is not yet proof of safe swimming. Only with the bronze badge does a child count as a sicherer Schwimmer, a safe swimmer.
education
Sufficient, With Defects
German report cards use six grades. Their definitions are written into state school law, for example in North Rhine-Westphalia. Each grade measures the work against die Anforderungen, the requirements. Sehr gut (1) means the work meets them to a special degree. Gut (2) means it meets them fully. Befriedigend (3) means it meets them in general. Ausreichend (4), sufficient, is the lowest pass. It is work that zwar Mängel aufweist, aber im Ganzen den Anforderungen noch entspricht, that has defects but still meets the requirements as a whole. Mangelhaft (5), defective, means that the requirements are not met. The grade names go back to a resolution of the Conference of Education Ministers of October 3, 1968.
The First Phase of Design
In 1977 Gerhard Pahl and Wolfgang Beitz published Konstruktionslehre, a handbook of engineering design. Through many new editions it is still a standard work, and it has been translated into seven languages. Its method begins with Klären der Aufgabenstellung, clarifying the task. The result of this phase is a written requirements list, the Anforderungsliste. The phases of concept, layout and detailed design come after it. The engineering guideline VDI 2221 also begins with clarifying the task. In its 1993 edition, this is the step in which the requirements for the product are defined.
The Exam Verbs
German school exams use Operatoren, operators. These are verbs that tell the student what a task demands. The lists differ from state to state and are based on recommendations of the Standing Conference of Education Ministers. Each verb has a written definition. In a physics list from North Rhine-Westphalia, nennen, to name, means to list objects, facts, terms or data without further explanation. Begründen, to give reasons, means to confirm something in a logically stringent and complete way. Beurteilen, to assess, means to form an independent judgment using subject knowledge and subject methods, and to give reasons for it. A 2019 paper by Eike Thürmann finds that the system is less exact than it looks. The same verb is sometimes defined differently in different subjects.
Given, Wanted, Answer
German school children learn a standard order for solving a word problem. First they read the task carefully. Then they write down what is given and what is wanted, gegeben and gesucht. Only then do they plan the calculation and calculate. The last step is the answer, written as a full sentence, the Antwortsatz. A school lab report follows the same logic. It starts with the question the experiment is meant to answer and the expected result. Equipment, setup, procedure and observation follow, and the evaluation comes last.
The First Chapter of a Thesis
Many German theses open with a section called Problemstellung, the statement of the problem. University guides set out what it must contain. A guide from the FOM University of Applied Sciences asks students to formulate here the questions the study will answer and to explain why they chose this research question. The goals of the work follow in a separate section. A bachelor’s thesis guide at the Free University of Berlin asks students to delimit the topic clearly in the introduction. The introduction should not anticipate the main part.
Erfurt, 2002
On 26 April 2002 a former pupil killed 16 people at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt and then himself. He had been expelled in October 2001, months before the Abitur exams, and a Gymnasium pupil who left without the Abitur had no school-leaving qualification at all. Thuringia closed that gap. Since 2004 every pupil at a Thuringian Gymnasium must take an exam at the end of grade 10, the Besondere Leistungsfeststellung. The weapons law was also changed. Sport shooters under 25 now need a medical and psychological examination, and the rules for storing guns and ammunition became much stricter.
The Curve Discussion
The Kurvendiskussion, the discussion of a curve, is a standard topic of school mathematics. It is the investigation of the graph of a function by working through a standard set of properties. They include the domain, symmetry, the points where the graph crosses the axes, high and low points, inflection points, asymptotes and the behavior at infinity. It is relatively popular with weaker pupils and students as an exam topic that can be prepared for with relative certainty. It is also criticized as a purely computational routine that conveys little understanding. In central Abitur exams, such schematic tasks are now set only rarely.
Through All the Keys
Johann Sebastian Bach finished the first part of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier in 1722 and the second in 1740/42. The title page promises preludes and fugues durch alle Tone und Semitonia, through all tones and semitones, zum Nutzen und Gebrauch der Lehrbegierigen Musicalischen Jugend, for the use of young musicians eager to learn. Each part has 24 preludes and fugues, one pair for every major and minor key. In notes from his studies with the conductor Hans von Bülow, Theodor Pfeiffer records the sentence Das wohltemperirte Clavier ist das alte Testament, die Beethoven’schen Sonaten das neue, an beide müssen wir glauben. The Well-Tempered Clavier is the Old Testament, Beethoven’s sonatas the New, and we must believe in both.
The Code of Good Scientific Practice
In 1997 one of the largest cases of falsified research in German medicine came to light. In response, the German Research Foundation, the DFG, wrote a memorandum on good scientific practice in 1998 and appointed an ombudsman in 1999. In 2019 the memorandum was replaced by a code of 19 guidelines. Every university must turn the code into its own binding rules. The code states plainly: Einrichtungen, die die Leitlinien nicht umsetzen, erhalten keine Fördermittel. (Institutions that do not implement the guidelines receive no funding.) The University of Potsdam, for example, announced that it had to adapt its statute on Selbstkontrolle in der Wissenschaft, self-control in science.