Overview
- North Rhine-Westphalia has about 30,000 Abitur candidates this year, down by 48,000 from 2025, because the switch back to nine school years created a one-year gap between graduating classes.
- Written exams in NRW start in mid-April for roughly 22,000 students at 494 schools, with about 8,000 more at 231 vocational colleges following later in April.
- In Lower Saxony, the centralized Abitur is now under way for around 30,000 students at 460 schools, with history opening the written tests.
- Lower Saxony schools ran trial downloads of encrypted exam files in March, and for French or Spanish started in grade 11 the speaking test now counts as part of the written exam.
- NRW draws tasks from Germany’s states’ shared pool, which since 2025 also covers biology, chemistry and physics to keep standards comparable, and the ministry projects about 70,500 candidates in 2027.