Study shows wide discrepancies in how Czech schools mark their students
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Loading... - Agata Alex Kral
- 12 Jul 2022
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The way children in the Czech Republic are marked is not always fair according to a newly published study conducted by the think-tank IDEA at the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. There is a difference by one whole grade in how individual schools mark their students and this in turn can have a negative effect on the ambitions of pupils to advance further in their education, as one of the authors of the study, Daniel Münich, explains.
“To make it brief, if we compare two pupils with the same results in scores in international testing, the one grade difference in marking increases significantly their ambitions to apply for schools and for an educational path that leads to universities.
“The grades are much more important than the knowledge, demonstrated by the test scores, itself.”
I read in your study that up to 80 percent of those ninth graders who get a 1 (top mark) in maths want to go to university, whereas among those who get a 3 it is just 39 percent. The study also revealed gender differences in how students are marked. Girls are apparently likely to get on average a grade that is better by a third than boys. Could you explain this?
“The gender difference has been known before and it is not only the case in the Czech system, it is found internationally.
“The natural interpretation is that the grades for knowledge also include some kind of evaluation of attitudes – how pupils do their homework, how polite they are in classes, and so on.
“Girls, at this age, are performing better. This is an imperfection in the grades, where they measure these two things but most people think that they just measure educational achievement.”
Do socio-economic differences play any role as well?
“Yes. And this is very similar. Pupils from weaker socio-economic backgrounds, meaning pupils who do not have parents standing behind their shoulders watching closely whether they are going to school on time and doing their homework, are getting weaker grades. Read More...
