English Maturita - Just the facts...

Before I relate any stories from this year's Maturita, I thought it would be good to share some of the facts about the results for the English Maturita exams. The following information includes the results for both the state & the school oral exams.

CLASS	NUMBER OF STUDENTS	1	2	3	4	5	AVERAGE
4A	26	14	9	3	-	-	1.58
8B8	25	15	6	4	-	-	1.56
4B	18	8	4	6	-	-	1.89
8A8	25	18	5	1	-	1	1.44
TOTAL	94	55	24	14	-	1	1.59
%	-	59%	26%	14%	-	1%

I'm not one to normally make a big deal about statistics - I am quite hopeless at Maths. But during the last 2 weeks while my colleagues & I have been examining students in English, some things have become very clear.

From my perspective, as a native speaker, these results are easily the best I have ever been involved in during my time at S.G.O! Over the years, I have worked with some exceptional students & classes, but collectively, this has been the most impressive. 

Before making some comments, I wish to stress that (in my opinion) my colleagues & myself were very firm & fair about the marks we gave. Whatever mark a student got, I believe they honestly deserved it - there were NO easy 1's, for example. There were some borderline cases, as there always are, but our consensus was always clear in the end.

I find it amazing that only 1 student got a worse mark than a 3! (Sadly, a fail...) I really don't think that has ever been the case before...

However, I must give a very special mention to 8A8 - collectively, this was a very strong class (& it must be noted that the score of 1's could have been higher, but some students had slightly worse marks than they would normally get, perhaps due to the choice of topics?) - it truly has been a pleasure to work with such a strong class. I taught them 4 years ago, and it's been a real thrill & joy to see their English develop over the years. Well done, all of you! 

And why are the results so good this year? Do we have better students? Are the teachers doing a good job? Is the use of English becoming more common in a student's life these days? Perhaps it's a mixture of all of them - but one thing is for sure, it's a great reward after a solid year of teaching.