The postcode lottery : how access to Scotland's most advanced mathematics qualification at school-level impacts students' degree-level performance

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Burns, Nathan and Kelly, Louise and Sherriff, Andrea and Young, David (2024) The postcode lottery : how access to Scotland's most advanced mathematics qualification at school-level impacts students' degree-level performance. In: British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics Spring Conference, 2024-03-02 - 2024-03-02, Online.

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Abstract

For Scottish secondary school pupils who have already achieved the minimum grades in ‘Higher Mathematics’ to enter STEM undergraduate programmes but wish to prepare further, there exists ‘Advanced Higher Mathematics’. While not required, this qualification is viewed favourably by many higher education institutions and is often specified as recommended. However, schools in Scotland’s most deprived areas do not run as many Advanced Higher Mathematics courses as schools in the least deprived areas. This paper shows that within one Mathematics and Statistics department, students with Advanced Higher Maths have higher odds of completing a Bachelor’s with Honours degree than those with Higher Maths. This is potentially problematic since the degree-level performance of students is enhanced by obtaining a qualification that was perhaps not available to every Scottish pupil.

ORCID iDs

Burns, Nathan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9743-4634, Kelly, Louise ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2242-0781, Sherriff, Andrea and Young, David ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3652-0513;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)