2024-07-30 19:50:22
Batak is first in Bulgarian, and in Antonovo
impress in math. However, there are entire clusters of municipalities with low average scores
Where are the most successful seventh graders in Bulgarian language and mathematics?
At the next external evaluation, the gap in achievements between the two exams shrinks. However, differences between individual regions remain, with clusters with low average scores becoming increasingly clear.
When analyzing the data, it should be borne in mind that the smaller the number of students who appeared, the greater the probability that the average result in the specific municipality will vary significantly from year to year, and it is possible that a small municipality will rank among the leaders, where only a few well-prepared students appeared.
On the contrary, large municipalities, where a large number of students appear every year, generally maintain relatively constant results.
The leading municipality of the Bulgarian language and literature exam for 2024 is Batak, with 70 points out of a possible 100, followed by Zlatograd and Borino, with 70 and 66 points, respectively. The reason why small municipalities come out ahead in the ranking of success in external evaluation or matriculation exams is often related to the small number of students who appear for them.
The top ten is completed by the regional centers of Varna, Sofia, Blagoevgrad, Veliko Tarnovo, Burgas and Ruse, as well as the small Smolyan municipality of Nedelino.
This year, the difference between the strong cluster of Rhodope municipalities and the rest of the country seems to be smaller, and the big cities, led by the profiled schools, are breaking through the foreground in the ranking. There is not a single municipality with less than 10 points, and at the bottom is Treklyano with 11.
Clusters with lower results in the Bulgarian exam are formed in the Northeast and Northwest, around Plovdiv and Stara Zagora, as well as near Yambol.
On the mathematics exam, the leader in terms of high success is the municipality of Antonovo with 62 points, followed by Koprivshtitsa and Belitsa with 60 each.
Only two regional centers are among the first 10 municipalities – the capital and Varna, where schools with the highest achievements at the national level are concentrated.
And in mathematics, there are no municipalities with an average score below 10 points. As far as one can talk about clustering in regions with high results, they are mostly in Smolyansko, Srednogorieto, Gabrovo and Veliko Tarnovo.
After the external evaluation, the analysis is confirmed that almost all municipalities perform significantly better on the Bulgarian language exam than on the math exam (but the two exams were not designed with the idea of comparing them directly – that is, the conclusions from the comparison are highly conditional and illustrative.
If we go back, the difference is significantly smaller – while in 2023 it was 20 points in favor of the Bulgarian language, in 2024 it shrinks to 12 points. In 2024, however, the mathematics exam underwent corrections that predisposed to the higher results – an increase in the time to work on the problems of the first module by 15 minutes and a change in two of the problems from open-ended to closed-choice ones.
There are also more municipalities in which mathematics has an advantage – 22 compared to only 9 a year earlier. There are also fewer of those with a very large difference in favor of the Bulgarian language, with only 20 municipalities having a deviation of more than 20 points against the background of 111 last year. This dynamic is most likely dictated to a certain extent by the differences in the content of the exams between individual years, which do not guarantee comparability.
(From the weekly newsletter of the Institute for Market Economics)