Academic ability among teachers: The unusual case of Norway

Teacher candidates generally earn astonishingly poor ratings when compared with other people who rely on college degrees and certificates for their professional preparation. College freshmen in the United States who declare that they wish to become teachers have relatively low average achievement scores. The American College Testing Program (Weaver, 1978) recently looked at the relative standings of beginning students in the United States in 19 fields and found that those wishing to be teachers tied for 17th place on their math test and 14th place on their English test. After four years of study, the typical education major graduates from college with a cumulative gradepoint average of 2.72, or a B(Sykes, 1984, p. 60). The declining interest in teaching as a profession can only exacerbate the situation. According to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the University of California at Los Angeles, the percentage of American freshmen interested in teaching declined from 8% in 1976 to less than 5% in 1982 (CIRP, 1982). Educators in the United States might derive some consolation from findings on teacher qualifications in other major countries, where teacher candidates are also rarely competitive with their colleagues in the academic fields. Recent research in Japan (Inoue, 1975) indicates that the mean score on the national secondary school leaving examinations of primary teacher education candidates is the lowest of any group entering the university. In England, Taylor (1969, p. 178) reviewed colleges of education and concluded that they “are drawing upon educationally inferior groups as compared with the university, and that some of them have student bodies who are markedly inferior in terms of academic qualifications.” A recent International Labor Organization (ILO, 1981) report indicated that, just as in the United States, throughout the world interest in teaching as an occupational choice is decreasing. For example, in the Federal Republic of Germany, the number of secondary school graduates who declared teaching as a career objective fell from 38.5% in 1974 to 16.2% just two years later. One major exception to this unfortunate condition is Norway, where students applying for teacher training have better average high school graduation marks than those entering university faculties (Skard, 1975, p. 29). In Norway, the grade standard is determined by averaging all course and external examination marks in the last three years of secondary school. Marks range from 6 to 0 points, with a 6 representing the best score, 2 a low passing score, and 1 and 0 an unsatisfactory or a failing score. The 6 mark is rarely given and might roughly be equivalent to a U.S. grade of A+, while the 5 is roughly equivalent to an A. At Bergen the cut-off grade standard for admission to the teachers college in 1983 was a remarkable 4.6, while it was only 2.0 in all University of Bergen studies except medicine, dentistry, and psychology. At Oslo, the ratio of applications to admissions at the two teachers colleges in 1983 was 7: 1, while the ratio of applications to admissions at five of the seven faculties at the University of Oslo was no more than 2:l. Students in these cities often attend the university in order to enhance the possibility of their being admitted to the teachers college.