Effective Approaches to Enhancing the Social Dimension of Higher Education

Despite all intentions in the course of the Bologna Process and decades of investment into improving the social dimension, results in many national and international studies show that inequity remains stubbornly persistent, and that inequity based on socio-economic status, parental education, gender, country-of-origin, rural background and more continues to prevail in our Higher Education systems and at the labour market. While improvement has been shown, extrapolation of the gains of the last 40 years in the field show that it could take over 100 years for disadvantaged groups to catch up with their more advantaged peers, should the current rate of improvement be maintained. Many of the traditional approaches to improving equity have also necessitated large-scale public investments, in the form of direct support to underrepresented groups. In an age of austerity, many countries in Europe are finding it necessary to revisit and scale down these policies, so as to accommodate other priorities, such as balanced budgets or dealing with an aging population. An analysis of the current situation indicates that the time is ripe for disruptive innovations to mobilise the cause forward by leaps and bounds, instead of through incrementalist approaches. Despite the list of programmes in this analysis there is very little evidence as to the causal link between programmes, methodologies for their use and increases/improvements in equity in institutions. This creates a significant information gap for institutions and public authorities seeking for indicators to allocate limited resources to equity improving initiatives, without adequate evidence of effectiveness. The IDEAS project and this publication aims at addressing and improving this information gap. (DIPF/Orig.)

The problem posed by exam choice on the comparability of results in the Finnish matriculation examination

The article focuses on the upper secondary matriculation examination in Finland as a school leaving and university entrance examination. The presented research addresses the question of whether increased choice of the subject-specific examinations has the potential to undermine the comparability of examination results and to direct students’ choices not only in the examination but already beforehand at school. The authors refer to Finland’s tradition of more than 160 years of a national examination connecting the academic track of upper secondary schools with universities. The authors explain the Finnish system by describing the adoption of a course-based (vs. class- or year-based) curriculum for the three-year upper secondary education and the subsequent reforms in the matriculation examination. This increases students’ choices considerably with regard to the subject-specific exams included in the examination (a minimum of four). As a result, high-achieving students compete against each other in the more demanding subjects while the less able share the same normal distribution of grades in the less demanding subjects. As a consequence, students tend to strategic exam-planning, which in turn affects their study choices at school, often to the detriment of the more demanding subjects and, subsequently, of students’ career opportunities, endangering the traditional national objective of an all-round pre-academic upper secondary education. This contribution provides an overview of Finnish upper secondary education and of the matriculation examination (cf. Klein, 2013) while studying three separate but related issues by using data from several years of Finnish matriculation results: the relation of the matriculation examination and the curriculum; the problems of comparability vis-à-vis university entry due to the increased choice within the examination; the relations between students’ examination choices and their course selection and achievement during upper secondary school. (DIPF/Orig.)