Because this was my last year of high school, I had to take the state exams. The state exams consist of four parts: the prima prova, the seconda prova, the terza prova and the orali. Those names are very imaginative and translate to "first test," "second test," "third test," and "orals."
The exams test us on what we learned in specific subjects during the fifth year. In addition, we have to present a "percorso di studio" which is basically further study on something that we found interesting and how it relates to what we studied at school. Most people do it in the form of a mini-thesis.
We don't know exactly which subjects are going to be on the exams until mid-April, apart from Italian (always obligatory). At that point, the government releases a statement specifying the subject matters to be included and how the exams will be proctored. This year, all the language schools had physics and French (with the proctors coming from other schools) and a second language (this year, English) tested by their own teachers. Additionally, our teachers had to get together to decide the remaining subjects to be tested.
That is how we ended up with Italian, English, French, physics, math and history/philosophy on our tests. The prima prova is always Italian. That's just how it is. You can choose between writing a newspaper article or a short essay, or analysing a poem. You have six hours to do this. The day of the day of the prima prova, you also have to turn in an outline of your research topic, so you have to have that ready, as well.
When a language, the seconda prova is similar to the prima prova, except the writing part is shorter and you have some short response questions. I was lucky, because English was chosen. The seconda prova is not always a language: one class had to do a latin translation and another had to do a test on Italian law.
The terza prova is by far the hardest. You have three hours to do it and involves four different subjects, each of which has either two or three questions. You have to answer with an 8-10 line response, and thereby demonstrate you know the material well. This is difficult because you questions can be very specific or alternatively very vague, to the point that you don't necessarily know what is pertinent to the response (and, being a year's worth of material, the small number of questions makes you vulnerable to small gaps in knowledge).
For the orals, you have to present your research, answer questions about it, and then answer anything else that the teachers feel like asking, which could be anything.
I did my tesina on music. I started with sound waves and what they are. Then I talked about Schopenhauer and the hierarchy of the arts. I then went on to talk about Baudelaire, D'annunzio and Wilde, concentrating on their thoughts on music (part of the goal of a tesina in the linguistic high school is to demonstrate that you can use the language, so we are encouraged to present authors in the language that they wrote in, so I had a tri-lingual thesis). Then I talked about a music/language called Silbo Gomera which is a language composed of whistles. After that, I presented the effects that music has on our brains, and how the authors' ideas that I had previously discussed held true from a scientific point of view.
I'm still waiting for my results, so fingers crossed... Ciao,
Florence
The exams test us on what we learned in specific subjects during the fifth year. In addition, we have to present a "percorso di studio" which is basically further study on something that we found interesting and how it relates to what we studied at school. Most people do it in the form of a mini-thesis.
We don't know exactly which subjects are going to be on the exams until mid-April, apart from Italian (always obligatory). At that point, the government releases a statement specifying the subject matters to be included and how the exams will be proctored. This year, all the language schools had physics and French (with the proctors coming from other schools) and a second language (this year, English) tested by their own teachers. Additionally, our teachers had to get together to decide the remaining subjects to be tested.
That is how we ended up with Italian, English, French, physics, math and history/philosophy on our tests. The prima prova is always Italian. That's just how it is. You can choose between writing a newspaper article or a short essay, or analysing a poem. You have six hours to do this. The day of the day of the prima prova, you also have to turn in an outline of your research topic, so you have to have that ready, as well.
When a language, the seconda prova is similar to the prima prova, except the writing part is shorter and you have some short response questions. I was lucky, because English was chosen. The seconda prova is not always a language: one class had to do a latin translation and another had to do a test on Italian law.
The terza prova is by far the hardest. You have three hours to do it and involves four different subjects, each of which has either two or three questions. You have to answer with an 8-10 line response, and thereby demonstrate you know the material well. This is difficult because you questions can be very specific or alternatively very vague, to the point that you don't necessarily know what is pertinent to the response (and, being a year's worth of material, the small number of questions makes you vulnerable to small gaps in knowledge).
For the orals, you have to present your research, answer questions about it, and then answer anything else that the teachers feel like asking, which could be anything.
I did my tesina on music. I started with sound waves and what they are. Then I talked about Schopenhauer and the hierarchy of the arts. I then went on to talk about Baudelaire, D'annunzio and Wilde, concentrating on their thoughts on music (part of the goal of a tesina in the linguistic high school is to demonstrate that you can use the language, so we are encouraged to present authors in the language that they wrote in, so I had a tri-lingual thesis). Then I talked about a music/language called Silbo Gomera which is a language composed of whistles. After that, I presented the effects that music has on our brains, and how the authors' ideas that I had previously discussed held true from a scientific point of view.
I'm still waiting for my results, so fingers crossed... Ciao,
Florence
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