A natural experiment emerged because of Covid, say business analyst of education Patricia Meertens and policy officer of education Shannen Jerbouh to the Council. “The cohorts from 2016 up to 2018 had the standard BSA, in 2019 there was none and in 2020 it was lowered.”
What did the collected data show? Regardless of whether there was or was not or a lowered BSA standard, the percentage of students that met with the old BSA standard, has been practically the same for all those years, varying from 73 to 78 per cent.
Could it be possible that students achieved less well because of Covid, but that exams were corrected with more leniency, student council member Lotte Meerhoff wondered? Yes, that is possible, according Jerbouh, who mentions two other possible explanations. “Maybe students spent more time studying during Covid than before, because there was less else to do. A third option is that more fraud took place than before.” Although she feels that the last one is unlikely: “It is a national trend, and it doesn’t seem plausible to us that fraud took place on a national scale.”
However, anyone who did not make it according to the old BSA standard, but was allowed to continue on because of a lowered BSA, seems unable to catch up on their studies and so suffer a study delay, Jerbouh later added in a phone call. This concerns on average a little over 4 per cent of the number of first-year students doing a study programme with a BSA standard.