This study examines how secondary school teachers’ epistemic beliefs about reading and writing, as well as their conceptions of students, shape their perceptions of materialgestütztes Schreiben as an examination format. The analysis is based on problem-centred interviews with six teachers conducted in the 2014/15 school year, during an early phase of the curricular implementation of the format and analysed using the documentary method. The reconstructions reveal different emphases between transmissional and transactional beliefs. At the same time, individual cases show domain-specific tensions between beliefs about reading and writing. The findings also indicate that perceptions of the examination format are shaped by institutional conditions such as the amount of material, time constraints, and assessment logic. The results are exploratory and contribute to a hypothesis-generating interpretation of subject-related beliefs about materialgestütztes Schreiben.