O czym mówią egzaminy zewnętrzne

Abstract

In the course of the educational reform, external examination was introduced to schools, yet school-internal grading was also retained. The achievements of a school-leaving pupil are characterised by the school-leaving test and teachers’ grades. Since correlation of the test results and teachers’ grades is not high, what is a better prognostic of success at the next level of education: an internal or external exam? When success is measured by the grades in the first form of gymnasium, the more adequate prognostic are the grades in the last form of elementary school. In external examination, when compared to internal grading, girls have less advantage over boys, and upper-class children have more advantage over their lower-class contemporaries. The author presents various hypotheses explaining why girls score less in the external examination, in comparison to the course of school learning. The most plausible hypothesis seems to be the one of specialisation, which states that the school grades and the external exam in fact evaluate different things. Internal tests measure the cognitive resources accumulated as a result of school learning. The external examination measures pupils’ resources regardless of the source of their acquisition. The author believes that internal grading shows girls’ advantage over boys, since girls’ motivation to learn at school is higher. In the external examination, knowledge acquired outside school proves to be more useful than in school tests. That might also explain why the higher social-economic status of the family facilitates scoring higher grades in the external exam than those reported by the internal school tests.