Morocco’s Private Schools Under Scrutiny for Grade Inflation in Baccalaureate Exams

Do private schools continue to inflate students’ grades in order to guarantee their success in the baccalaureate? The answer is probably affirmative. Assabah, which examined certain grade reports that leaked onto social media after the announcement of the 2024 baccalaureate results, notes a "flagrant difference between the modest grades obtained in the national and regional baccalaureate exams and the excessive ones from continuous assessment". The continuous assessment grades, awarded by the schools, are decisive in the success or failure of students, as they represent 25% of the overall baccalaureate grade. The remaining 75%: there are 25% for the regional exam and 50% for the national exam.

To support this finding, the newspaper reports that a student from a private school whose report it examined had a grade of 19.27 in continuous assessment, 13.10 in the regional exam in the first year of the baccalaureate and 5.3 in the national exam. Another student obtained 3.16 in the national baccalaureate exam and 19.62 in continuous assessment. The difference between the evaluation of the same subjects in the national exam and in continuous assessment is just as striking. A science candidate, for example, obtained a grade of 19.5 in continuous assessment in mathematics, while he only had 3 in the national exam. The same observation is made in physics-chemistry: he obtained 0.75 in the national exam, but 19.5 in continuous assessment. Everything therefore indicates, according to the publication, that private schools are inflating the averages of their students.