Things That Are Different in Finland: Maturity exam
BF: I just have to take the maternity test to graduate Me: It’s ‘maturity’. ‘Maturity test.’ BF: Well, I gave birth to this thesis
Normally in Finland, in the course of completing your degree, you have to write a thing called a kypsyysnäyte (”maturity exam”) after you have submitted your thesis but before your profs can give you a grade on it. It is essentially a pass/fail examination in which you are given a topic drawn from your thesis, and you have to write a 500-700 word essay about it in proper essay style and format. Your supervisor looks at it first to check the content, then it's passed on to somebody from the Language Center [sic]* department who looks over it to assess the quality of the writing.
I guess it’s kind of a written, lite (weightless, even?) version of a thesis defense. It’s mainly intended to be an extra check to make sure you really did write your own thesis: checking if you really do know the stuff you wrote about, and checking if you have the writing skills to write a self-contained short essay about it. I think it is mostly just a formality to write this thing these days, since it wouldn’t be difficult to read someone else’s thesis and write about it. That’s essentially every single book exam.
Students only need to do this once, so Finnish students normally write it for their bachelor’s paper because it’s their first thesis in the system. If they then proceed to the master’s level, then the one-page abstract of the masters thesis counts in its stead at that level. For those of us who did not write such a thing at the bachelor level, we have to write the full essay thing for the master’s degree.
The language you write the exam in depends on the main language of your grade school/high school background; so this is normally going to be Finnish, regardless of whether you majored in a foreign language and/or you wrote your thesis in a foreign language. The only exceptions are the degree programmes taught in English, like mine; the exams for these are written in English.
BTW: I noticed that the information about the content that should be in one’s essay is available in English on the registration page for the exam (since all of the course/exam registration pages - in the Humanities department anyway - are now bilingual), but the information from Language Center about how to format your essay is only in Finnish. And everybody hates Language Center for their own reasons so I think it would be for everyone’s own good to, you know, tread carefully around them.
* [sic] because for the longest time it was spelled this way. It’s since been Britishified to match, well, all the other British spellings (such as in “degree programmes”). But for a long time it seemed a bit of an anomaly.
Apparently the Finnish Medical Society Duodecim gives out prizes each year for the best maturity exam essays written by students of medicine. I have honestly no idea why this is a thing; maybe it has something to do with recognizing people who are able to articulate complicated medical things clearly to normal people like who their patients might be.
