High school students in Germany have been complaining in an online petition about their final exam in English, saying the test was much harder than in previous years.

As of Sunday, students in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg had gathered almost 36,000 signatures — even though only 33,500 took last month's statewide exam.

Students complained that text excerpts from American author Henry Roth's 1934 novel "Call it Sleep" were too difficult and obscure to analyze and asked for the grading to be more lenient.

The final high school exams in Germany — called Abitur — are a rite of passage that all students who want to enter university have to pass.

State governor Winfried Kretschmann had only limited compassion for the students, saying "there's no right to a simple Abitur."