Students’ performance in ethics assignments in Finnish Matriculation Examination in 2017–2021

Abstract

Finnish students complete their studies in general upper secondary school by taking the Matriculation Examination in at least five subjects. In recent years, a growing number of students has chosen to take an exam in philosophy. However, there is no systematic study on how students perform in the philosophy exam. This study is focused on those assignments within philosophy that concern ethics. The question to be discussed is how students meet the key goals of ethics education that are defined in the Finnish National Core Curriculum 2015. The material of the study consists of the curriculum, ethics assignments, grading guidelines and the performance statistics in 2017–2021. The main observation is that the average performance, according to the statistics, is better in assignments in normative ethics than in metaethics, but in neither area of ethics, an average student typically attains half of the maximum points that is considered a threshold for a satisfactory but not yet good performance. The approach of the study is a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis is conducted to interpret what the quantitative data about an average student’s performance tells about his or her proficiency in ethics assignments.