First the happy news: Sweden's students read and perform well in school. They got a slightly higher grade when they left ninth grade this spring compared to last spring, for example in Swedish.
Then on to the bad: The same students plummet to the bottom when their performance is measured more independently in the international PISA survey.
This is how it has looked for the past seven years in both reading comprehension and mathematics as well as natural science.
In the previous Pisa measurement in 2022, one in four 15-year-olds failed to achieve a basic level of reading comprehension.
Today, almost every third student, 31 percent, lacks basic skills in reading comprehension.
This means that today's fifteen-year-olds lack basic skills to function in a future study and working life, according to the Pisa measurements made by the OECD.
When the news was presented a few weeks ago, a shock wave went through the school world and Swedish politicians started talking about an alarming reading crisis.
But if you look at Swedish students' grades, the picture looks brighter.
The question is how serious the Swedish reading crisis really is when the grades in Swedish and Swedish as a second language have remained largely unchanged for the past seven years.
Also, when DN checks the grade averages on the national tests, they are even and indicate that there is no reading or math crisis.
The government's grade investigator Magnus Henrekson thinks it is relevant to make comparisons between the graduation grades and the Pisa results.
- This shows that we cannot trust the grades in the Swedish school, says Magnus Henrekson who is also a professor of economics at the Institute for Business Research.
Is this the result of what is called happiness rating?
- Yes, of course it is.
A B three years ago does not mean the same thing as a B today. Nor is it the same as a B at another school, according to Magnus Henrekson.
There are many strong incentives in the Swedish school system that drive grades up, he believes.
One is that school leaders and teachers have a lot to gain by avoiding giving students the grade F, which means fail.
If a student is at risk of getting an F, for example, the school must put in special measures that cost money.
- That is one of all the reasons why teachers prefer to set what is called nice-E (passed), says Magnus Henrekson.
It is also easier to get good grades in schools where there are more weak students.
And if there are multiple schools in an area or locality, grades tend to be pushed up by competing with each other for students.
- At a good school in a rural town, which has no competitor, the grading is often more modest.
One way for a school to attract more students is to display a high grade point average because grades serve as a means of competition.
The problem is that there are no tests that anchor them in objective criteria. For example, it could be a final exam that is marked by external examiners and not, as today, by the schools themselves.
The National Education Agency is analyzing the differences between the grades and the results in Pisa 2025 to see what they might be due to.
Anyone can understand that the curves cannot follow each other completely. But isn't it strange that they don't follow each other at all?
- We think so too, and that is why we are investigating it. But the grades and Pisa do not measure the same things, says Pernilla Jonsson, who is unit manager for international studies such as Pisa.
One difference compared to the grades is that the Pisa measurement is specially constructed to be able to be compared over time.
- The grades, on the other hand, cannot be fully compared between the cohorts. Among other things, because the national tests are not designed for comparability between years, says Pernilla Jonsson.
One explanation for the students performing so much worse in Pisa could be their motivation. Because they know that the tests are not grade-based, the Norwegian School Board was able to state in 2018 and 2022 that the students did not exert as much effort on the Pisa tests as on the national tests.
- When they did Pisa in 2015, we saw that they were roughly equally motivated. Maybe because we used digital samples that they thought were funny, or was it something else in the outside world that did it, she says.
If everything goes as planned, a new grading system with a ten-point scale will be introduced in autumn 2028. Then new national final exams will replace today's national exams in the ninth grade.
They must be corrected by external examiners and the hope is that they will serve as more objective anchors for fairer graduation grades.
In 2031, the first ninth-graders will go out with the new grades.
