The common mathematics test for the tenth grade, intended for around 37,000 pupils across the state, was called off. Its questions had circulated on social media in advance. According to available information, the leak occurred in Dachau, at the Josef Effner Gymnasium, where a pupil allegedly photographed the first page of the test, which was lying openly on a desk in the school office.
The photograph appeared in school chats as early as Tuesday, two days before the exam, and by Wednesday had spread quite widely across the Free State. On the evening of the same day, the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Culture decided to cancel the test, which had been scheduled for Thursday, 1 October.
The Cause of the Leak Proved Simple
The test papers were kept in the school secretariat in open access, without any protection. Several sources of the newspaper Dachauer Nachrichten confirmed this detail independently of one another. The pupil did not have to break into anything or search for anything, since the printed papers apparently simply lay on a desk.
In response to an official enquiry from journalists, the Bavarian Ministry of Education confirmed what had happened, but, as usual, preferred a populist, euphemistic formulation: “Owing to an oversight at one school, the test questions became known ahead of time.” The ministry’s spokeswoman declined to name the school in question, although the newspaper’s sources have almost no doubt as to which Gymnasium it was. The school’s headteacher, Peter Marais, did not respond to enquiries, although journalists contacted him repeatedly.
Why the Test Could Not Be Held on the Scheduled Day
The logic behind the cancellation is simple: equal conditions for assessing knowledge must be provided for all participants, and once the test had leaked online, it was no longer possible to guarantee this, since some tenth-graders had seen the questions beforehand and others had not. Schools were permitted to use the same questions for internal knowledge checks, but without grades and without passing the results to the ministry.
For Bavaria, this exam is no ordinary class test. The annual tenth-grade test is one of the main instruments by which the state compares the level of Gymnasium pupils’ attainment across all schools. The story is made sharper by the results of recent years: the Bavarian average was 3.8 in 2025, 3.5 a year earlier and 4.13 in 2023, on the German six-point scale, where one is the best grade and six the worst. Against this background, the cancellation of an entire round of testing seems especially galling.
This Is Not the First Such Leak
A year ago something similar had already occurred in Bavaria, when the questions for an English test became known in advance. After that incident, the Ministry of Education sent schools a letter with an emphatic reminder that examination materials must be stored in such a way that access to them before the due time is ruled out altogether.
A spokeswoman for the Bavarian Ministry of Education acknowledged that a repeat of last year’s episode is particularly illogical. “It is all the more regrettable that it has happened again. We will thoroughly examine the root causes of what happened,” she said.
What Remains Unanswered
The ministry said nothing about the further fate of the pupil from Dachau. Nor was there any explanation of why, in the year since the previous leak, the Bavarian Ministry of Education had still not prepared a reserve set of questions in case of a repeat failure. Nor why school secretariats still treat security so negligently, especially when, after the previous leak of tests online, schools had been notified of the need to store tests properly before testing. One teacher told Dachauer Nachrichten that criticism of the ministry officials’ lack of professionalism and of the absence of a reserve set of test questions is far from new. The problem has been discussed in the school community for years. Yet at the same time, in all the media we see daily loud populist statements and promises from ministry officials.
The test had been announced before the summer holidays. For many Gymnasium pupils it was to have been a small but significant item in their final grades. Months of preparation, stretching across the summer and the start of the new school year, have turned out to be a formality, since this work will now bring anyone neither points nor credit.
Why This Matters
The story from Dachau shows how vulnerable Bavaria’s education system remains. It once again demonstrates how unprofessional the populists in the Bavarian government are: able to speak beautifully and at length, but unable to calculate risks and control processes. And it shows how unseriously teachers, and possibly the school’s headteacher, treat security recommendations. A single unlocked folder left on a desk in one school secretariat was enough to put in question the results of an entire round of testing for the whole of Bavaria. The fact that almost the same story with the English test was repeated after only twelve months points to the main thing: sending schools reminders does not in itself solve the problem unless it is followed by a real check on how materials are stored locally. And unless the ministry officials themselves begin to fulfil their duties instead of going from one interview to the next.
For now, the Bavarian Ministry of Education discloses neither the specific school where the incident occurred nor its further steps (if it has devised any at all), and thousands of tenth-graders are left without the result of a test for which they had prepared for several months.
