Prof. Karin Kleppin by the Goethe-Institut Kamerun

On the 26th and 27th September 2017 the annual meeting of the secondary school ministry (MINESEC) for the consultants of the subject german, took place in Yaoundé.  It’s been a long-standing tradition that the Goethe-Institute Cameroun offers a 2 day lasting seminar after the ministry meeting for the 40 experts, who coach over 2000 teachers of german, all over the country.
This year we were able to welcome Prof. Dr. Karin Kleppin, who taught the experts over these 2 days about “competence-based testing”.
Last year the curriculum in Cameroun switched from knowledge-based to competence-based lessons. That’s why the demand of learning how exams change through competence-based and practical orientation, was very high. Who could give a better coaching, than Prof. Dr. Karin Kleppin, who is not only an expert in this field, but also dealt with this topic in one DLL unite.
“The change in the curriculum has been a big challenge for us. Through this seminar we got a good idea of how to work with the methods, which is really rewarding”, states an expert from the extreme-north region.
The participants realized pretty quickly, that the competence-based testing is not as easy as expected, when they should create a multiple-choice-task of their own. After analyzing the different propositions, it became visible that most of them weren`t useable. “Don`t worry”, says Prof. Dr. Kleppin, “when we create new tasks in the TestDaF- Institute, we have to get rid of 90% of the suggestions, before we find suitable Multiple-Choice tasks.”
As for the essence of the seminar, most experts remembered the very descriptive quote from Prof. Kleppin: “The boss” is the test construction, which means, it is the most important part to know exactly which specific competence is supposed to be tested through an exercise. You might think, that this is an obvious requirement, but it shouldn`t be taken for granted at all.
​“It was really helpful, that we did not only create our own exercises, after talking about the theoretical methods, but also applied these tasks to our national exams in Cameroun”, says Mister Rapahel Nguedia, national inspector for german in the secondary ministry.

“We couldn`t have asked for a better seminar”, adds his colleague, Miss Ebissemie, “a big thank you, to Prof. Dr. Karin Kleppin!”