Influencia de las asignaturas optativas en el premio extraordinario de la Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO)

Abstract

Education has always been, and still, is an indispensable factor for human, economic and social development in such a way that strengthening and improving it becomes something indispensable and to do that, many countries are looking for indicators to evaluate their educational system. One of the tests used in Galicia, Spain is the grant of the Extraordinary Prizes of Secondary Education to the most brilliant students, being an indicator of quality and excellence. They are very demanding tests with five compulsory exams and an optional one to choose where only 20 awards are given which represent around 6-7% of the students that attended the exams. In this article it is going to be analyzed if the test is equitable and if there is statistically significant influence of the optional subjects chosen at the time of obtaining the Extraordinary Prize of Secondary. In particular, it will be studied the case of two optional subjects which are Physics-Chemistry and Biology-Geology, that for the period 2008-2013 represent the 85% whereas the other four represent the 15%. This way, the main hypothesis presented is: “The students that choose the optional subject Physics-Chemistry over Biology-Geology get worse final marksand have fewer probabilities to win the Extraordinary Prize of Secondary Education”.