The 2026 Hungarian school leaving exam relied excessively on rote knowledge and even contained factual errors  an expert analysis

Although formally compliant, the 2026 Hungarian language and literature matriculation exam was pedagogically flawed in several respects, said subject teacher Mariann Schiller. She added that this year’s test relied too heavily on lexical knowledge and students’ memory, while offering little guidance for interpretation and, in several ways, could not be considered realistic. Below, we present in detail what the expert sees as the main problems and the rare merits of this year’s exam.

The 2026 exam period began on Monday with the written Hungarian language and literature test. At the intermediate level, students first had to complete a reading comprehension and language task set based on interpreting an interview related to Mór Jókai. The literature section also included classic task types: questions on figures of speech, ordering lines of poetry, and identifying characters from literary works. Students were also required to identify the stylistic movement and rhyme scheme of a given poem, and the test included questions related to Albert Wass and Ferenc Herczeg.

In the second part of the exam, students had to write an essay: they could choose either to analyze a poem by János Arany or to write a thematic essay. In the latter case, they had to present the characteristics of the “summary of existence” poem type through the lyrical works of three different Hungarian poets.

To what extent these tasks were balanced, interpretable, and pedagogically justified was analyzed together with Mariann Schiller, subject teacher and board member of the Hungarian Teachers’ Association.