The PISA 2025 report has been marked this year by the cheating of Catalonia, excluded by the OECD from the international results for leaving out 23.2% of students with learning needs from the exam when only 5% can be exempted. This has distorted the sample. The Catalan results – the best in all of Spain, because the students with the worst results were left out – are not comparable with the rest of the territories, although they do appear with an asterisk in the Spanish book.
This scandal has resulted in the dismissal of the Generalitat’s number two in Education and the opening of disciplinary proceedings against three officials. The reason is that, when the Generalitat informed the school principals of the students who could be excluded, it spoke of newly arrived students who did not master Catalan or those assessed by the teaching staff as “with intellectual or emotional disabilities,” but did not specify that the maximum limit was 5%, so the principals removed all those they considered.
What no one expected was that there would be more autonomous communities with high samples. EL MUNDO specifically asked the OECD about this, which replied that Catalonia was the only case. But it is now known that Murcia has excluded 12.7% of students, when PISA rules only allow up to 5%. In PISA 2022, Murcia’s exemption rate was 4.1%.
Balearic Islands also have a very high percentage: 7.5%, according to the Ministry of Education.
“It is the reality of the classroom”
Sources from the Murcian government explain that the Ministry of Education warned them that “the sample was not correct because a very high exclusion percentage was being applied and, before taking the exam, it was corrected.” “The schools were called and told they had to test all students. We heeded the Ministry’s warning; our situation is not like Catalonia’s. We have worked with the Ministry,” they defend.
But why, even so, did they continue excluding 12.7% of students? “Because that is our classroom reality. In Murcia, we have those percentages of diversity. We are the second community after Galicia that enrolls the most students with special needs in ordinary schools. And we have many immigrant students who do not know the language,” argue the sources from Murcia.
“Upward bias”
The OECD has accepted the approach of Murcia and the Balearic Islands. Not so for Catalonia, which has increased its excluded students from 5.6% recorded in 2022 to 23.2% now. All this, as this newspaper already reported, has shot up Spain’s overall exemption rate, which reaches 7.9%. PISA does not see it as bad: “While the PISA 2025 results for Spain can be validly compared with those of other countries and previous cycles, the results of Catalonia are not presented separately.” But it raises doubt because it adds: “It is very likely that the high levels of student exclusions lead to an upward bias.”
Other countries, in previous editions, have had percentages similar to Spain’s. This was the case of Canada (5.8%), USA (6.1%), Netherlands (8.4%), and Denmark (11.6%), whose results were published with a specific note in the international report warning that “high levels of student exclusion may bias performance results upward.”
Spain, in any case, plays with an advantage. So do the Balearic Islands and Murcia compared to other regions with lower exclusion rates: they do not exceed 3% in Asturias and Castilla y León, while they are below 4% in Cantabria, Andalusia, the Valencian Community, and Galicia.
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