An error will make the results of Catalonia in the PISA tests not comparable with other territories or previous years
An incident at the time of deciding which students do or do not take the test causes the sample not to be representative
BarcelonaSerious setback in the Catalan education system. The results of the PISA tests in Catalonia, which will be made public at the beginning of September, will not be comparable with other territories nor with previous years' editions. In other words, the PISA report will not allow us to see if the level of Catalan students has improved or worsened. The reason is what the Department of Education has described as a "technical, isolated, and isolated incident." Broadly speaking, Catalonia has not correctly applied the criteria set by the OECD - the initiators of the PISA tests - to justify that a student does not pass the tests, which has meant that the sample of students who did take the exams is not representative of Catalan students aged 15. This is a fact that the Government received an alert about in March and communicated this Friday, July 24th. The Government has already opened an investigation to clarify the causes of the error.
As explained by the Director General of Curriculum and Professional Development, Sónia Fernández Cuenca, there has been an error in the exemption index, meaning, in the percentage of students who have been considered, either due to physical, cognitive, and emotional disabilities or lack of language proficiency, not to take the PISA exams. Specifically, the OECD sets the percentage of exempted students at 5%, and in the 2025 tests in Catalonia, this percentage soared to 23.2%. In other words, the number of students who have not taken the PISA tests in Catalonia is too high for the exam results to represent the actual level of students born in 2009. A priori, the sample for the PISA tests in Catalonia was 2,545 students, and of these, up to 591 were decided not to take the exams: six for physical disability, 92 for insufficient language proficiency, and up to 493 for cognitive, emotional, or behavioral disability.
All of this will make the results not representative and, according to the Department of Education and the Ministry of Education, they cannot be compared with the scores of other territories nor with Catalonia's own results in previous years.
However, this does not mean that Catalonia will not receive the results of the PISA tests. In fact, the average obtained by Catalan students who have taken the test will be used to determine Spain's results in the OECD report because, according to the Government, the error in the sample does not affect representativeness at the state level. "If the sample is not balanced, the results are not comparable, but they are valid," defended Fernández Cuenca. "We are facing a technical error, not a problem with the students' level or the quality of the educational system. There has been no manipulation or concealment of data," insisted Fernández Cuenca, on several occasions during the hearing he held for "responsibility and transparency".
What happened?
Although the department has assured that the reasons for the error are still being investigated, they have put forward several facts that warn that they are "not conclusions", but that provide contextual information around the error. One of these "context" facts is that, as Fernández Cuenca has detailed, the PISA tests coincided in a very short time with the end-of-stage tests for 4th year of ESO —the old basic competences— and the Catalan tests have broader criteria than those of the OECD when deciding which students are exempt from taking the exam. This could have led the educational centers themselves to have "confusion" when applying the correct criteria to each test.
Here, it should be taken into account that, as Education has described, although the OECD, two companies, Spain and the communities are involved in the circuit to determine which students pass the tests and which are exempt, the final step in applying the exemption criteria lies with the educational centers themselves.
Another fact that the Director General of Curriculum has admitted is that the application of the PISA tests —from May 31 to May 16— coincided with a "transition process" between the Superior Council of Evaluation (the body that had been responsible for the application of the tests for years) and the Agency for Evaluation and Prospective of Education (the new body on which the evaluations of the educational system depend). "At the time of the events, the agency's creation process was still being constituted," admitted Fernández Cuenca.
