“This is really the worst thing you can imagine,” student Aryan Roozy Talab told the Metro newspaper.
Another student, Patricia Kjellby, is sceptical she and her classmates will be able to don their traditional white caps next week to celebrate the completion of their upper secondary school education.
“We’re supposed to graduate in four days and I’m meant to complete a course that is actually supposed to last the whole year. That’s impossible,” she told the Expressen newspaper.
“To be honest, I’m extremely pissed off; that they figured this out now, just a few days before graduation.”
The students’ frustration stems from the shocking news delivered by officials at the Aniaragymnasiet high school that they neglected to teach the students a required course in religion.
According to the school’s principal, the mix-up stems from a misinterpretation of the curriculum laid out by Swedish law.
“When you read the law, it can be interpreted that you can switch religion with social science,” Christel Berver, principal at the publicly-funded, privately-managed free school, told Metro.
But such a change isn’t, in fact, allowed.
Students had raised the issue previously with their teachers, expressing suspicions that the school had left something out, but to no avail.
“The last two years I’ve wondered, ‘Aren’t we supposed to have religion?'” said Kjellby.
“They said that we had social science instead so I thought that stuff about Buddhism and everything would come then, but it never did.”
Now students have less than a week to complete the entire course in religion to avoid finishing high school with incomplete marks.
Alternatively, the students can accept a failing mark for the course and then make up the course in the autumn, the Göteborgs-Posten (GP) newspaper reported.
TT/The Local/dl
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