This is the time of year when final year students having earlier taking their final year exams (the results of which are used when deciding who gets to which University or other further education place) get their final score(s).

It's also the time of year when based on those scores there's a league table of all the grammar schools (US: high schools) in the country and of course the competition among schools in the same general geographic area to be higher up the list than each other (even though we might be talking about halfway down the total list) is tough.

(The "dirty tricks?" are coming soon)

Now what seems to happen is that one person (or set of people) marks the tests and another (presumably more qualified) person then checks that the marks given are reasonable and if not can adjust them up or down.

What also seems to happen is that the head teachers are given the preliminary results for their school based on the first set of marks.

One head teacher (female) in a school in the West Coast of Finland noticed that in one subject 19 of her 25 pupils had been marked down by the checker. So she asked the central system who the checker was and found out it was the head teacher (female) from the next school along the coast!

As a result of the suspicion that this downgrading had been done intentionally to cause that person's own school results to have a better chance of being better, someone else was given the job of re-reviewing the same papers. As a result of that 10 of the 19 papers were put back to where they had been.

It does seem that it was a case of "hang the students from that school and their chances of getting to University, I'm going to try to make sure my school is higher up in the lists than the neighbouring school" but unless the second head teacher is taken to court and the matter judged by the lawyers, we're going to have to assume it was all just a coincidence.

At least officially.

Meanwhile I'm not holding my breath that any further action will be taken. This is Finland after all ...