Decomposing grade inflation in Sweden's compulsory school
(2021) NEKH02 20211Department of Economics
- Abstract
- In Swedish media, there has been a heated debate regarding the school system. Since 1992, free schools, which are similar to voucher schools, have been permitted as a competitor to municipal schools. This was combined with a new grading system where knowledge based criteria were implemented as opposed to the previous normally distributed grading system. Due to Sweden’s lack of standardised and centrally graded tests, schools have been suspected of increasing merit points (grades) without a measurable increase in knowledge in the system as a whole and in free schools in particular. Thus leading to the purpose of our thesis, which is measuring grade inflation in Swedish compulsory school.
This thesis uses the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition... (More) - In Swedish media, there has been a heated debate regarding the school system. Since 1992, free schools, which are similar to voucher schools, have been permitted as a competitor to municipal schools. This was combined with a new grading system where knowledge based criteria were implemented as opposed to the previous normally distributed grading system. Due to Sweden’s lack of standardised and centrally graded tests, schools have been suspected of increasing merit points (grades) without a measurable increase in knowledge in the system as a whole and in free schools in particular. Thus leading to the purpose of our thesis, which is measuring grade inflation in Swedish compulsory school.
This thesis uses the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method to decompose the average grade differences for both the national tests and the final merit points given to pupils in grade 9 in order to separate reasonable differences from potential grade inflation. We find that there is a potential grade inflation between free schools and municipal schools when using variables collected by Skolverket and Statistics Sweden (SCB) ranging from about
18.00 to 34.63 percent depending on the test and variables used. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9049738
- author
- Nilsson, Elias LU and Liang, Sofie LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- NEKH02 20211
- year
- 2021
- type
- M2 - Bachelor Degree
- subject
- keywords
- grade inflation, municipal schools, free schools, Sweden’s school system
- language
- English
- id
- 9049738
- date added to LUP
- 2021-07-05 13:35:23
- date last changed
- 2021-07-05 13:35:23
@misc{9049738, abstract = {{In Swedish media, there has been a heated debate regarding the school system. Since 1992, free schools, which are similar to voucher schools, have been permitted as a competitor to municipal schools. This was combined with a new grading system where knowledge based criteria were implemented as opposed to the previous normally distributed grading system. Due to Sweden’s lack of standardised and centrally graded tests, schools have been suspected of increasing merit points (grades) without a measurable increase in knowledge in the system as a whole and in free schools in particular. Thus leading to the purpose of our thesis, which is measuring grade inflation in Swedish compulsory school. This thesis uses the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method to decompose the average grade differences for both the national tests and the final merit points given to pupils in grade 9 in order to separate reasonable differences from potential grade inflation. We find that there is a potential grade inflation between free schools and municipal schools when using variables collected by Skolverket and Statistics Sweden (SCB) ranging from about 18.00 to 34.63 percent depending on the test and variables used.}}, author = {{Nilsson, Elias and Liang, Sofie}}, language = {{eng}}, note = {{Student Paper}}, title = {{Decomposing grade inflation in Sweden's compulsory school}}, year = {{2021}}, }