03.02.2025

GEO-Article: Are school grades still fit for purpose?

Study on the comparability of school grades cited

Grades are considered a fair form of selection: clear and objective. However, a study with the involvement of active and former members of the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology and LEAD Graduate School & Research Network confirms what many educational researchers have criticised for a long time: School grades say little about actual ability. The researchers Nicolas Hübner, Malte Jansen, Petra Stranat, Thorsten Bohl and Wolfgang Wagner compared the grades of around 55,000 ninth-graders with their performance in IQB-Bildungstrend examinations. The result: pupils with the same school grades show ‘substantially different competences’.

_{Hübner, N., Jansen, M., Stanat, P. et al. (2024): Alles eine Frage des Bundeslandes? Eine mehrebenenanalytische Betrachtung der eingeschränkten Vergleichbarkeit von Schulnoten. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-024-01216-9} 

A current article in GEO addresses the question of the fairness of school grades and quotes the results of the study.
To the GEO article (in German)