The Theory and Practice of Upper Secondary Certification

1. The evolving demands on upper secondary certification

Abstract

Upper secondary certification is an important feature of all education systems. Often, it is the aspect of the education system that attracts most debate, and most emotion, amongst students, parents, the media and the wider public. It is also an aspect of education systems that attracts significant interest from policymakers and influential stakeholder groups such as tertiary education institutions and employers. In short, upper secondary certification matters to society. This chapter provides an introduction to upper secondary certificates, setting out how their function has evolved over time and the central knowledge and skills societies and education systems now expect them to assess.

Aims of this report

While significant research and policy work within countries aims to identify the most appropriate uses of upper secondary certification in line with national policy goals, published comparative work analysing upper secondary certification internationally is relatively rare.1 Yet, policy discussions between countries highlight commonalities in the challenges and questions across countries on the topic. This report is developed in response to sustained discussions with policy officials about their counties’ upper secondary certificates. Through the OECD’s Informal Working Group on Assessment and Certification (Box 1.1 sets out the purpose and function of this group), established as part of the Education Policy Committee’s Transitions in Upper Secondary Education: Shaping Pathways for Work, Life and Learning project, countries raised the central question of how upper secondary certificates might and can evolve in light of the general broadening of the curriculum.

Box 1.1. OECD work on certification and assessment in upper secondary education

The OECD’s work focuses on how assessment and certification can recognise the breadth of student achievement in reliable and valid ways to promote learning that matters. Learning that matters refers to the knowledge, skills and understanding that are essential for young people to achieve their aspirations, the learning objectives for students in their country and for the economic and social development of their societies. OECD work also focuses on ensuring how certificates can provide an effective passport for students’ futures, notably by facilitating access to higher education, post-school training and other forms of education and work.

Informal Working Group on Certification and Assessment in Upper Secondary Education

The Informal Working Group was created in June 2023 to steer the OECD’s work on certification and assessment as part of the Education Policy Committee’s Transitions in Upper Secondary Education: Shaping Pathways for Work, Life and Learning project. It is composed of policy officials with responsibility for assessment and certification policy in a Ministry or an arms-length assessment body or agency. The list of the members of the Informal Working Group are provided in Annex A to this report. The group meets annually in person and virtually throughout the year to be updated on the project and provide feedback and insights to orient the development of future work.

Sources: OECD (n.d.[1]),, Transitions in Upper Secondary Education: Shaping Pathways for Work, Life and Learning, https://www.oecd.org/en/about/projects/transitions-in-upper-secondary-education.html

Underpinning the central question of how upper secondary certificates might and can evolve in light of the general broadening of the curriculum are three common questions that this report focuses on:

• How can (and should) upper secondary certificates evolve to reflect the increasing breadth of national curricula aims, which commonly include a wider range of transversal skills, and even personal qualities and attributes, than in the past? Box 1.2 discusses the concept of curricula broadening.

• How can upper secondary certificates include the diverse skills and achievement of all students, respond to the need for increasing inclusivity and comprehensiveness, while in many cases still serving a selective and discriminatory function to shape access to post-secondary education and work?

• How can upper secondary certificates achieve the above – greater comprehensiveness and inclusivity, and a discriminatory function – while maintaining the validity and reliability that are essential to their role as high stakes events?

This report aims to advance understanding related to these policy questions by providing new information and insights about the range of options available for the design of upper secondary certificates, the trade-offs associated with different options and how systems across the OECD design certification.

This section sets out the aims and structure of this working paper, defines upper secondary certification and provides a brief history of its evolution including the contemporary context in which certificates operate, to highlight changes that are key to understanding the educational, political and social context of certification. This section ends by developing principles specifically for upper secondary certification to guide countries in their reflections and reforms. These principles are used throughout the report’s subsequent chapters to discuss the trade-offs associated with different types of assessment components.

Box 1.2. How have learning expectations evolved in the 21st Century?

At a high level, curricula should aim to equip students with the skills, understanding and knowledge that they will need for future education, work and life in general. As societies evolve, curricula must naturally also evolve to respond to the changing world and context that young people will enter. The OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 project engaged with stakeholders across government, school leaders, teachers, students, researchers, social partners and others in a multi-national consultation about the kinds of competencies students and teachers will need to thrive in the future.

These consultations highlighted that modern curricula broaden the goals of education to include “education for citizenship”. Education for citizenship goes beyond acquiring academic or occupational skills and knowledge and is reflected in the Learning Compass developed by the Education 2030 project in collaboration with stakeholders across systems. The Learning Compass sets out the types of competencies students need to navigate towards the future, individually and collectively. The Compass includes seven different elements, including concepts that might not have been commonly featured in curricula in the 20th century such as attitudes and values, student agency, social and emotional and metacognitive skills. The Compass also includes three “transformative competencies” that students need to thrive in the world and shape a better future: creating new value, reconciling tensions and dilemmas and taking responsibility (OECD, 2019[2]).

What “broader” competencies do curricula typically include?

At national or system levels, many systems now include a broad range of cross-curricula themes in their system-wide learning goals. Across 37 systems who provided information in 2020, more than half reported education goals focused on environmental education and sustainability; local and global citizenship and peace; and health education, well-being and lifestyle (OECD, 2020[3]). Most OECD systems also feature social and emotional skills, which are explicit goals in the majority of systems’ conceptions of the skills that a young person should have by the end of school (OECD, 2021[4]).

Source: OECD (2019[5]), PISA 2018 Global Competence Framework, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-issues/global-competence/Handbook-PISA-2018-Global-Competence.pdf (accessed on September 12 2025); OECD (2020[3]), Curriculum Overload: A Way Forward, https://doi.org/10.1787/3081ceca-en; OECD (2021[4]), Embedding Values and Attitudes in Curriculum: Shaping a Better Future https://doi.org/10.1787/aee2adcd-en.

Structure of this report

Pressures to assess an increasingly wide range of skills while maintaining selectivity (i.e. for competitive higher education selection) as well as critical assessment qualities such as validity and reliability is a common operating context for upper secondary certificates around the world (key assessment terms such as validity and reliability used in this paper are described in Box 1.3). Yet, the diversity of upper secondary systems internationally makes it challenging for countries to compare policies and practices to identify common lessons learned and draw conclusions to inform their own practice. This report aims to facilitate such policy learning by:

• Developing principles and a matrix for assessment for upper secondary certification (Chapter 2)

• The trade-offs associated with different types of assessment approaches (Chapters 3-5)

• Identifying how systems across the OECD practically make use of different assessment approaches and the relationship between assessment and student performance (Chapter 6).

Box 1.3. Key assessment terms used in this working paper

When designing assessments that will be fit for upper secondary certification purposes, education systems seek to find a balance between technical and practical considerations. Arguably, the two key technical considerations for assessment design are validity and reliability. The definitions and use of both terms have been the subject of extensive academic debate (Haertel, 2006[6]; Kane, 2022[7]). Despite this, both are probably used by every assessment professional in every assessment system in the world.

As an illustrative example, the Scottish Qualifications Agency (SQA) in Scotland (United Kingdom) provides specific guidance on assessment that discusses validity and reliability:

Validity is a measure of the accuracy of an assessment. An assessment is valid when it:

• is appropriate for its purpose

• has been designed to allow candidates to show that they have the required knowledge, understanding and skills to meet the standards of the qualification

• allows all assessors to make reliable assessment decisions

• allows the interpretation and inferences which can be drawn from the assessment outcomes to be meaningful and justifiable

Reliability is a measure of the degree of consistency with which candidate assessment evidence is judged. In other words, assessment decisions should be consistent across all assessors for all candidates undertaking the same assessment task. Reliability is achieved by:

• assessments with high content and construct validity

• the use of consistent conditions of assessment

• standardisation exercises by assessors. (SQA, 2017[8])

This report uses the following definitions of validity and reliability that build on those from previous OECD publications (OECD, 2013[9]):

• Validity relates to the appropriateness of the inferences, uses and consequences that can safely be derived from the assessment outcomes. The term is commonly understood as referring to the extent to which the assessment measures what it has been designed to measure: a highly valid assessment ensures that all relevant aspects of student performance are covered by the assessment.

• Reliability is concerned with consistency. It refers to the extent to which the assessment is consistent in measuring what it sets out to measure. A highly reliable assessment ensures that the assessment is accurate and not influenced by the particular assessor, assessment occasion or assessment task.

There are other key principles which assessment professionals use to judge assessment quality, but this report focuses on validity and reliability as the main concepts that are in general use and essential for all types of assessments. Other considerations are captured in the principles developed for the design and assessment of upper secondary certificates (discussed in Chapter 2).

Source: OECD (2013[9]), Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264190658-en; Haertel (2006[6]), “Reliability” in Educational Measurement, Praeger Publishers, https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:001197070 (accessed on 21 October 2025); Kane (2022[7]), “The Evolution of the Concept of Validity” in The History of Educational Measurement: Key Advancements in Theory, Policy, and Practice, Brian E. Clauser and Michael B. Bunch (Eds.), Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367815318; SQA (2017[8]), Guide to assessment, https://www.sqa.org.uk/files_ccc/Guide_To_Assessment.pdf (accessed on 28 November 2024).

The OECD Secretariat worked with members of the Informal Working Group on Assessment and Certification (discussed in Box 1.1 and see Annex A) to use the matrix presented by this report in Chapter 2 to map the upper secondary certificates across OECD countries. Overall, 38 education systems participated in this mapping, covering 71 upper secondary certificates. The insights from the mapping are discussed in Chapters 3-6. Through the mapping process, adjustments and refinements were made to some of the categories and definitions in the matrix to reflect the diversity of country practices. These adjustments and refinements are discussed in Chapter 2 of this report.

Definition and context of upper secondary certification

Upper secondary certification is an important feature of all 21st century education systems. At the end of upper secondary education, all OECD education systems deliver a form of written certification, graduation report or diploma to students having completed the programme. In most systems, this takes the form of grades in each of the concerned subjects, an overall grade or certain additional information (OECD, 2013[9]).

Upper secondary education

Upper secondary education refers to ISCED 3, in the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED). Some of the defining features of upper secondary are an increasing range of options and differentiation, and the preparation it provides for individuals to enter work or tertiary education (Box 1.4) (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2012[10]).

The provision of separate vocational and general education influences upper secondary certificates

Within upper secondary education, most OECD systems (37) provide separate vocational or general programmes in upper secondary education (Stronati, 2023[11]). Both general and vocational upper secondary education aim to equip young people with skills to succeed in the world beyond school. However, learning objectives and content differ slightly:

• General education programmes are designed to develop students’ general knowledge, skills and competencies, as well as literacy and numeracy skills, often to prepare participants for more advanced education programmes at the same or a higher ISCED level and to lay the foundations for lifelong learning (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2012[10]).

• Vocational education programmes are designed to enable students to acquire the knowledge, skills and competencies specific to a particular occupation, trade or class of occupations or trades (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2012[10]). In many countries, some vocational upper secondary programmes are also a direct pathway to higher vocational education and training and professional higher education. Such programmes might be defined as providing discipline-oriented education in the pure sciences, humanities and arts. While such programmes will also provide knowledge and skills of labour market relevance, these are applicable in very diverse contexts and are not intended to prepare students for a particular profession, occupational family or industrial sector (OECD, 2022[12]).

Box 1.4. Principal characteristics of upper secondary education, ISCED 2011 

The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) was developed to provide an international system for classifying countries’ education systems. ISCED aims to support understanding and interpretation of the inputs, processes and outcomes of education systems from a global perspective and ensure comparable data.

According to ISCED 2011:  

1. Programmes at ISCED level 3, or upper secondary education, are typically designed to complete secondary education in preparation for higher education or provide skills relevant to employment, or both.  

2. Programmes at this level offer students more varied, specialised and in-depth instruction than programmes at ISCED level 2. They are more differentiated, with a greater range of options and streams. Teachers are often highly qualified in the subjects or fields of specialisation they teach, particularly in the higher grades.  

3. Programmes classified at ISCED level 3 may be referred to in many ways, for example: secondary school (stage two/upper grades), senior secondary school, or (senior) high school.

Source: UNESCO (2012[10]), International Standard Classification of Education, ISCED 2011, https://www.uis.unesco.org/en/methods-and-tools/isced (accessed on 17 December 2025).  

A minority of OECD countries (e.g. Ireland, New Zealand and the United States) do not provide separate upper secondary vocational programmes, although they frequently provide occupationally-relevant studies and options for students.

The provision of separate general and vocational education creates questions for certification in terms of how these different skills and content areas are certified, and how certification across general and vocational education interacts. Where general and vocational education is provided separately, countries tend to provide distinct certificates, which are designed in two main ways:

• Multiple certificates of the same type for general and vocational programmes.

  In some systems, particularly where the different programmes have elements in common – such as some common courses, a common approach to assessment or being delivered in the same institutions – similar terminology is used for the certificate and the different certificates may share the same brand. For example, in France, the baccalauréat brand is used for the baccalauréat general and the baccalauréat technologique (both of which are classified internationally as general upper secondary education) and the baccalauréat professionnel (which falls under vocational upper secondary education for international classification) (Ministère de l'Education Nationale et de la Jeunesse, n.d.[13]).

• Distinct models of certification for general and vocational programmes.

  In other systems, certificates of general and vocational upper secondary education are more distinct. They may be regulated and awarded by different entities, support quite different possible further education pathways and, accordingly, they may look and feel distinct. For example, in Estonia, students who complete general upper secondary education gain an Upper Secondary Leaving Certificate, whereas students who undertake vocational education study predominantly in national vocational education institutions following a curriculum set by the school, based on a national curriculum for the relevant professional area (Haridus- Ja teadusministeerium, 2023[14]). Students in vocational education also receive a leaving certificate, with this reflecting the occupational area they have studied.

Upper secondary certificates and qualifications

To define upper secondary certification, this paper refers to the ISCED definition of qualifications (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2012[10]) to categorise and report cross nationally comparable education statistics. Within the ISCED framework, as set out in Box 1.5, the two main units of categorisation are programmes of learning and the qualifications that attest to their completion.

Box 1.5. Qualifications as defined by ISCED

Within the context of ISCED, an educational qualification is the official confirmation, usually in the form of a document certifying the successful completion of an education programme or a stage of a programme. Qualifications can be obtained through:

• successful completion of a full education programme

• successful completion of a stage of an education programme (intermediate qualifications)

• validation of acquired knowledge, skills and competencies, independent of participation in an education programme.

Successful completion of a programme is normally granted when a student has achieved specified learning objectives. Individual credits awarded for successful completion of individual courses (e.g., modules or subjects) are not considered as qualifications within ISCED. In such cases, a sufficient number of credits or subjects equivalent in duration and/or covering the curriculum of a full programme would represent a qualification.

ISCED 2011 considers the recognised qualifications corresponding to an education programme as a related unit of the classification. In ISCED, the term ‘qualification’ is synonymous with ‘credential’. Other terms such as ‘certificate’, ‘degree’ or ‘diploma’ are types of qualification and are treated as being synonymous with each other within ISCED.

In ISCED, education programmes are classified first and qualifications are subsequently classified. The ISCED mapping is the tool to show the links between education programmes and qualifications. Normally one education programme leads to one qualification. However, in some cases several different programmes can lead to the same qualification, and one programme can even lead to different possible qualifications.

Source: UNESCO (2012[10]), International Standard Classification of Education, ISCED 2011, https://www.uis.unesco.org/en/methods-and-tools/isced (accessed on 17 December 2025).  

What is an upper secondary certificate?

Terminology for the formal reports or records that are used to certify student achievement at the end of upper secondary education can be diverse and may sometimes cause confusion when comparing systems. Different terms are used across different cultural and linguistic contexts to describe what this report refers to as an “upper secondary certificate”, denoting the process of certification, such as:

• High school diploma

• Upper secondary completion certificate or graduation certificate

• School-leaving certificate

• Baccalaureate

• Matura.

While these terms have slightly different connotations, broadly, they all serve the purpose of recording student achievement at the end of upper secondary education. This report encompasses all upper secondary certificates that record, recognise and signal student achievement at the end of upper secondary education. As Table 1.1 sets out, in practice, this covers a wide range of certificates that are designed and function in differing ways. Table 1.1 sets out the main ways in which upper secondary certificates tend to vary across systems – the content they cover (i.e. does the certificate cover the entire curriculum or are there separate certificates for individual subjects); how they set requirements for student achievement (i.e. by requiring that students complete certain content/courses or through demonstrated achievement in each subject); how results are reported; and interactions with entry to higher education. Some of these categories are not mutually exclusive. Notably, it is common that systems set requirements both for the courses or content students cover and their achievement in each subject.

What is the difference between a certificate and a qualification?

At the level of overarching terminology, the terms ‘certificate’ and ‘qualification’ are common. In many countries, distinctions between these two terms are blurred, and they are used interchangeably. However, in other countries, a distinction is drawn between these two, with ‘qualification’ taken to signal an individual’s suitability to take on a particular course or job role (Isaacs et al., 2013[15]). Usually, upper secondary certificates do not qualify individuals for specific roles. Instead, they establish and communicate broad achievement. This working paper adopts the terms ‘certificate’ and ‘certification’ rather than ‘qualification’.

Upper secondary certification has two key functions for students

This report focuses on upper secondary certification’s purposes and uses for the individual student, rather than those for system monitoring or accountability uses.2 For the individual student, there are two main functions of upper secondary certification3:

Certifying knowledge, understanding and skills4

This function can be viewed as a backwards looking one, focusing on what the student has done. In certifying knowledge, understanding and skills, upper secondary certificates confirm and communicate information about the expertise that the student has gained. Stakeholders who are focused on this function will be concerned with the content and coverage of the certificate, how students’ grades relate to the curriculum and whether the assessment closely aligns to the curriculum (Newton, 2017[16]). The backwash effect of this function may also be important: certification provides a lever (or motivation) to ensure that schools, teachers and students cover the desired skills, knowledge and attributes of the curriculum.

Table 1.1. The diversity of upper secondary certificates across OECD countries

	Characteristics	Description	Examples	Frequency
Coverage	Individual subjects	Certificates are issued for the learning and achievement of a single subject	In United Kingdom systems, certification occurs at subject level with individual certificates for each subject or vocational specialisation e.g. General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) Biology, A Level Geography.	Rare
	Whole programme	The certificate represents learning and achievement across the breadth of the upper secondary programme	In British Columbia (Canada), students achieve the Dogwood Diploma based on grades from all their compulsory and elective courses.	Very frequent
Requirements	Specified curriculum content	The certificate requires students to engage with specified courses with some options	In Lithuania, students must sit a Lithuanian language and literature exam and at least one but no more than five additional exams.	Very frequent
	Non-specified content	The certificate leaves discretion for students to determine the content they cover	In New Zealand, students need 80 credits across different courses and units to achieve a National Certificate of Educational Achievement but the specific courses/content are not specified.	Very frequent – although normally only a fraction of requirements are elective
Reporting and communication	Results for subjects	The certificate records the student’s specific results for individual subjects	In Portugal, students’ results from final exams are recorded separately, as opposed to being combined into an average subject grade or overall average.	Occasionally (used in systems where subject grades are used for higher education selection).
	Overall grade	The certificate provides students with an overall grade; higher grades in one subject may compensate for lower grades in others	In France, to achieve the baccalaureate, students need an average grade of 10/20.	Frequent (where certificates determine eligibility for higher education entry)
Interactions with higher education selection1	Certificate provides eligibility	The certificate indicates a student’s eligibility to access higher education by demonstrating that they have completed upper secondary; other criteria play a limited role	In the Netherlands, students must achieve their upper secondary certificate (which has different names depending on their programme) to be eligible for higher education. An upper secondary certificate is typically sufficient to access higher education except in cases of high demand where a lottery is organised.	Frequent e.g. Belgium, Netherlands, Slovenia etc.
	Grades used for selection	The certificate communicates a student’s grades in specific subjects; grades are the dominant factor that influences higher selection	In Ireland, students’ grades on their Leaving Certificate are transformed into points by the Central Applications Office, the body that manages the selection process for tertiary entrance. Typically, the most in-demand institutions and courses will require higher points for entry.	Occasionally e.g. UK systems, Australia, Portugal, Lithuania
	Limited interaction	The certificate plays a limited role in selection for higher education	In the United States, access to higher education is organised independent of students’ grades in the High School Diploma (although a high school diploma or equivalent tends to be a component of admissions requirements), with students taking standardised assessment tests such as the SAT or the ACT to enter higher education. In some systems where there are higher education entrance tests, such as Poland and Spain, students must achieve the upper secondary certificate to be eligible to sit these entrance tests. Though, it is the higher education entrance test that matters most for higher education entrance.	Rare e.g. United States, Greece, Poland, Türkiye

Notes: ¹Practices refer to the main access routes for the mainstream students of typical age for first time entry to higher education. Many OECD systems also have a range of different access routes for different types of students.

In terms of evaluating whether the assessment is doing its job, the main stakeholder concern for this function is around whether the student has covered the right skills, knowledge and understanding: the validity of the assessment.

Facilitating selection

This function is essentially forward looking, focusing on the predictive power of the assessment or the certificate, and its uses in decision-making about the student’s next steps to post-secondary education, training or work.

Stakeholders who are focused on this function will be concerned with whether and how they can use the information conveyed by the certificate to make decisions about students (Newton, 2017[16]). Such stakeholders include higher education institutions who use the information in certificates to make judgements about how far a student has the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed on the course for which they are applying. Similarly, prospective employers will look for the achievement of certificates to indicate that a candidate has the foundational educational skills and knowledge, and potentially also the occupational competence, to be an effective employee in their organisation. Looking from this perspective, stakeholders need to be able to rely on the trustworthiness and transparency of the certified grades, and what matters most to them may be how robust the marking process is, and whether it can be shown to be consistent and reliable.

A brief history of upper secondary certification – and implications for its design and policy context

How and why upper secondary certification first emerged, and how it has evolved over time, helps to explain its current design and policy context (i.e. countries’ goals and what is socially feasible and desirable). The section below describes how certification was initially developed to serve selective purposes – to identify a minority of individuals for professional roles and tertiary education. Today, while the selective function remains, it exists alongside a more inclusive function. As upper secondary completion has become essential for all young people to access employment and lead fulfilling lives, certificates must also inclusively certify the diverse range of skills and achievement levels across the full cohort of young people.

Upper secondary certification has its roots in the drive for selection based on meritocracy

Upper secondary certification has a relatively short history within educational systems, but its antecedents lie in the history of examinations. Historians of testing suggest that Chinese civil service examinations are the earliest examples. These date back thousands of years, but began to exert a powerful influence on society around 1000 AD when they were opened up to large numbers of the population and became the key route to position, influence, and wealth (Hanson, 1994, pp. 186-187[17]) (Berry and Adamson, 2011, p. 7[18]). Interest in the civil service examinations from other countries came as early as the 16th century based on meritocratic interest: as a way of opening up influential social positions to those with greatest aptitude, rather than simply to those born into certain families (Hanson, 1994, p. 187[17])

Examinations, the antecedents of upper secondary certification, were designed to identify talent amongst a broad populace, providing the successful with a pathway to an elite position, and ensuring that the elite was not wholly populated by members from the same families. Many educational systems trace the history of their upper secondary certification to examinations or assessments that were used to select individuals from across society for elite posts. In the United Kingdom, school-leaving certificates have their roots in the examinations system that grew in the 19th century, with the establishment of ‘new’ universities outside the historic ones of Oxford and Cambridge (Tattersall, 2007[19]). Similarly in France, the baccalauréat was introduced by Napoleon in 1808 with two meritocratic purposes: as the secondary education leaving certificate, and as the higher education entrance exam (Gauthier, 2018[20]) (El Atia, 2008, p. 145[21]). Although of course, in practice, while these selection systems did open the door to some, they nevertheless fell short of meritocracy since success required the cultural and financial resources to prepare for the examinations (Stobart, 2008, pp. 19-22[22]).

The democratisation of upper secondary education creates demand for more inclusive certification

Over the course of the 20th century, and continuing in the 21st century, education has become increasingly democratised. The democratisation of education refers both to widening access and democratising the content and organising principles of education (Bondarenko, 1991[23]). It is widely recognised across OECD countries that upper secondary is the minimum level of education that young people need for success in life and work. Relatedly, government policies should aim at supporting all young people to complete a full cycle of upper secondary education, with certification open to all young people. This understanding is reflected in trends in upper secondary completion: while only 60% of 25-64-year‑olds in 1996 attained at least upper secondary education across the OECD on average, this was the case for the vast majority (81%) of 25-64-year-olds by 2023 (OECD, 1999[24]) (OECD, 2024[25]). Across OECD member states, democratisation of upper secondary education can typically be seen to necessitate several changes to the form and focus of certification, which are discussed below.

The demand for certifying an increasingly wide range of interests and aptitudes

As more and more of the cohort stay in education longer, education systems have had to consider how upper secondary certification can meet the needs of this larger cohort of students and provide testament to their diverse achievements. A parallel – and to some extent related – development is the transformational or gradual broadening of the knowledge, skills and attributes that are deemed to be important in curricula internationally. Systems’ responses to the need to certify a diverse range of skills at different levels of achievement have included:

• The inclusion of vocational skills within upper secondary certification (rather than outside it). In France for example, since 1985, students enrolled in the main vocational upper secondary programme are certified by the baccalauréat professional – recognised as an equivalent qualification in the country’s national qualification framework as the baccalauréat general which certifies general upper secondary programmes (Gaston and Prouzat, 2016[26]). Underlying the creation of a single certificate with different functions is the desire (and need) to recognise and communicate the qualitatively different but comparably valued skills across two different upper secondary programmes.

• Certifying diverse “levels” of skills. Many systems now offer core and compulsory skills at different levels of breadth and depth. Providing content at different levels caters both to different levels of achievement within the student population and recognises that upper secondary is the basis for diverse future pathways (OECD, 2024[27]). In Ireland for example, mathematics and Irish can all be taken at three levels corresponding to varying levels of breadth and depth – Ordinary, Foundation and Higher, and English at Ordinary and Higher levels. The levels respond to students’ different achievement levels and plans for the future. For example, the foundation level is intended to equip students with the knowledge and skills required in everyday life (Department of Education, 2015[28]). In contrast, higher-level maths is designed for students aspiring to pursue tertiary education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-related fields or other disciplines that demand a deep understanding of mathematics and mathematically intensive career paths (National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, 2015[29]).

• Certification that is inclusive of all students. In some systems, there is an attempt to make a single system of upper secondary certification inclusive of all students, including those with special educational needs, whether educated within so-called ‘mainstream’ upper secondary education, or separately. For example, in Scotland, increasing democratisation and inclusion of the qualifications system has been a key policy aim since the 1970s (McVittie, 2008[30]). Since 2000, all national qualifications, whether general or vocational, have been reported on the same certificate, the Scottish Qualifications Certificate (SQA, n.d.[31]). The Scottish Qualifications Certificate records and reports the main general and vocational school and college qualifications from levels 1 to 7. The same certificate encompasses qualifications at levels 1 and 2 of the Scottish Qualifications and Credit Framework, intended to certify the achievements of students with additional support needs, through a range of qualifications for all young people, up to and including the main higher education entrance qualifications (Scottish Qualifications and Credit Framework, 2024[32]).

Alongside the increasing democratisation, ideas about which knowledge and skills are valued have changed over time. This process of change has become more rapid and more important as technological innovation has changed the nature of learning, work and society. Increasingly, upper secondary certification is required to attest to, and celebrate, a very broad range of knowledge, skills, attributes and attitudes, including transversal skills, often referred to as ‘21st century skills’. For example, as part of developments to support the new Curriculum for Wales, Wales is introducing new “Made-for-Wales” qualifications that relate to and supports the Curriculum for Wales, including its four purposes (Box 1.6).

Box 1.6. Curriculum for Wales and Made for Wales GCSEs

Qualifications Wales, the qualifications regulator in Wales, has updated the main qualifications, General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs), that are typically taken by 14–16-year-olds at the end of the first phase of upper secondary education. From 2025, new Made-for-Wales GCSEs are aligned with the Curriculum for Wales. While each GCSE remains focused on a subject area, all GCSEs generate opportunities for learners to engage with the Curriculum’s cross-cutting themes, to develop cross-curricular skills of literacy, numeracy and digital competence and to develop the skills integral to the four purposes of the Curriculum.

Skills such as creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem-solving, personal effectiveness and planning and organising are seen as integral for learners to become:

• ambitious, capable learners, ready to learn throughout their lives,

• enterprising, creative contributors, ready to play a full part in life and work,

• ethical, informed citizens of Wales and the world, and

• healthy, confident individuals, ready to lead fulfilling lives as valued members of society.

These four purposes were first put forward in 2015 by an Independent Review of Curriculum and Assessment Arrangements in Wales, alongside a proposal to shift from a curriculum that defines the knowledge and experiences students ought to develop, towards a curriculum that focuses on the outcomes of learning, particularly in terms of the key skills, capacities or competences. The Independent Review explicitly references advances in technology and globalisation – transforming the way we live and work – as creating the fundamental case for change.

Source: Donaldson, G. (2015[33]), Successful Futures: an independent review of curriculum and assessment arrangements in Wales, Welsh Government, Cardiff, UK, https://www.gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2018-03/successful-futures.pdf (accessed on 22 August 2023); Qualifications Wales (2023[34]), Made-for-Wales GCSEs: Main Consultation Report, https://qualifications.wales/media/dkcisr1u/made-for-wales-gcses-main-consultation-report-january-2024-update.pdf (accessed on 16 November 2024); Welsh Government (2021[35]), Curriculum for Wales, https://hwb.gov.wales/curriculum-for-wales/ (accessed on 21 October 2025).

More democratic upper secondary education has arguably made selection more important

Democratisation has meant that previous practices of certification and/or selection at earlier stages have been abolished or attenuated in many systems. The increasing participation in upper secondary education takes away the element of self-selection (and selection) at primary and lower secondary, with the first main decision about a young person’s continued engagement with education now typically coming at the end of formal schooling on the basis of their upper secondary certificate.

While a minority of OECD systems (14 in 2023) continue to have national examinations at the end of lower secondary, these tend not to have a highly selective function (OECD, 2023[36]). In France, for example, the diplôme national du brevet (“brevet”) is an attestation of a young person’s knowledge and skills at the end of lower secondary without influencing access to upper secondary education (Ministère de l'Education Nationale et de la Jeunesse, 2024[37]). Similarly, while Ireland still has an examination and certificate at the end of lower secondary – the Junior Cycle Profile of Achievement – like the brevet in France, it is a record of a young person’s skills and knowledge at the end of lower secondary (Citizens Information, 2024[38]). In the nine OECD systems where selection does take place before the end of lower secondary education (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic and Switzerland), examinations and assessments in primary and lower secondary education may influence selection into different programmes, yet all young people have the right to attend a full course of schooling up to the completion of upper secondary education (Perico E Santos, 2023[39]).

While the democratisation of upper secondary education has reduced selection at lower levels of schooling, it has created greater pressures on upper secondary certificates for selection. One of the challenges of an upper secondary certificate that aims to certify learning across almost the full upper secondary population is that the certificate, and the assessments within it, lose their discriminatory value. This has immediate implications for selection to post-secondary, notably higher education, and society’s perceptions and the value of a certificate more broadly. In these cases, the site of selection might shift. In the United States for example, the vast majority of young people receive their state high school diploma, with the United States having one of the highest upper secondary completion rates across the OECD. In the United States in 2021, 86.5% of young people graduated within the theoretical duration of their programme (only three other countries, Estonia, Israel and Lithuania have slightly higher completion rates) (OECD, 2023[36]). In this context, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) – although not a standard graduation requirement – is a prominent feature of young people’s upper secondary experience, frequently playing a decisive role for selection to higher education. In France, while the baccalauréat was introduced in the 19th century based on the concept of meritocracy and egalitarianism, during the same century the highly selective grandes écoles – accessed via a separate examination system – developed and continue to be the most prestigious preparation for posts in the national administration, art, engineering and business, among others (Gauthier, 2018[20]). In both of these instances, the upper secondary certificates are not able to effectively fulfil their selection function – as a certificate cannot be discriminatory if everyone achieves it – and the system has introduced additional, external testing. While students are still able to access many higher education institutions without sitting these external tests, they are relied on by certain, more competitive institutions.

Contemporary demands and the context of upper secondary certification

As the history of upper secondary certification demonstrates, over time the pool of students whose skills must be certified has grown, creating demand to assess a wider range of skills. The widening of skills reflects two interacting dynamics – the first is to recognise the capacities of a larger and more diverse group of students, the second is recognising a broader set of skills because of the evolving needs in modern economies. The section below discusses the knowledge and skills which are now commonly included in countries’ expectations for upper secondary students and implications for upper secondary certification.

What skills and knowledge do systems expect young people to develop by the end of upper secondary?

Most systems aim to develop students’ complex competencies

Upper secondary curricula across all countries typically employ words like analyse, evaluate and produce because these are understood to be essential cognitive processes individuals need to navigate the challenges and contexts of daily life and make valuable contributions to their societies. In a taxonomy of educational objectives, processes like analyse and evaluate refer to more complex processes, or “higher order skills”. Box 1.7 discusses the hierarchy of processes set out in the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom’s Taxonomy includes both a knowledge and cognitive process dimension, which together show how students’ cognitive processes must interact with knowledge when undertaking tasks (Krathwohl, 2002[40]). For example, a student required to write an essay about the reasons why World War One began must draw on factual knowledge of events and conceptual knowledge of historical theories while employing the cognitive processes of analysis and evaluation.

In practice, skills, knowledge and understanding may not always exist in a clearly cut and unchanging hierarchy (Ormell, 1974[41]). How such cognitive skills are applied may depend on the context, or even the details of the task. For example, what appears as a “lower order” cognitive process in Bloom’s Taxonomy such as “understanding” may be demonstrated at high levels of complexity when a student infers conclusions from implicit information. The latter example of inference would also necessarily require “analysing” which is itself a higher-level process than understanding. Yet, while the hierarchy of Bloom’s Taxonomy is contested (Sockett, 1971[42]) and other frameworks of skills and knowledge exist (Biggs and Collis, 1981[43]), as a taxonomy that is well-established and still widely-used, it provides a useful entry point to discuss the different skills, understanding and knowledge that curricula cover and their role in high stakes assessments.

Box 1.7. Cognitive processes in the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

The original Taxonomy of Educational Objectives published in 1956 provides a framework for classifying statements of what students are expected to learn (Bloom, 1956[44]). A revised version was developed in 2001 (Anderson, 2001[45]). The cognitive dimension of the framework sets out the processes that educational programmes commonly employ in their objectives for student learning. Similar to the original taxonomy, the revised version orders processes from simple to complex, for example, “Remember” is understood to be less complex than “Analyse”. However, some categories overlap, for example some of the sub-categories of “Understand”, such as “Explain”, might be more complex than “Execute” which comes under “Apply”.

Structure of the Cognitive Process Dimension of the Revised Taxonomy

• 1.0 Remember – Retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory.

  • 1.1 Recognising; 1.2 Recalling

• 2.0 Understand – Determining the meaning of instructional messages, including oral, written, and graphic communication.

  • 2.1 Interpreting; 2.2 Exemplifying; 2.3 Classifying; 2.4 Summarizing; 2.5 Inferring; 2.6 Comparing; 2.7 Explaining

• 3.0 Apply – Carrying out or using a procedure in a given situation.

  • 3.1 Executing; 3.2 Implementing

• 4.0 Analyse – Breaking material into its constituent parts and detecting how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose.

  • 4.1 Differentiating; 4.2 Organizing; 4.3 Attributing

• 5.0 Evaluate – Making judgements based on criteria and standards.

  • 5.1 Checking; 5.2 Critiquing

• 6.0 Create – Putting elements together to form a novel, coherent whole or make an original product.

  • 6.1 Generating; 6.2 Planning; 6.3 Producing

Source: Krathwohl (2002[40]), “A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy: An Overview”, Theory Into Practice, Vol. 41/4, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2.

Individuals have always encountered situations where learnt behaviours and reproductive thinking (the less complex or “lower order” skills at the start of Bloom’s Taxonomy) are insufficient to solve a given problem or situation. Arguably however, as information becomes more readily accessible, with diverse forms of (dis)information and opinions constantly available from multiple sources, complex skills like evaluating and analysing are even more central. To prepare students for complex contexts, the integration of higher order skills or thinking – the ability to draw on our knowledge and skills like reasoning and analytical thinking – is a common feature of countries’ curricula (OECD, 2020[3]).

The recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) lead to questions around the skills that humans will need in the future. In the domain of Natural Language Processing – focused on allowing computers to process and simulate understanding of natural language in spoken or written form – AI systems such as ChatGPT-5 and its subsequent versions can now perform a huge variety of tasks like reading comprehension and reasoning. Considering a taxonomy of cognitive processes (such as in Box 1.7), this means that AI systems are already performing some mid-level processes like understanding and applying, and more complex processes like analysing. Frameworks such as the AI Capability Indicators (OECD, 2025[46]) have been developed to measure the development of AI systems against human mastery in nine domains, some of which overlap with the areas designated by Bloom's Taxonomy: language, social interaction, creativity, reasoning, metacognition, problem-solving and robotic intelligence. This framework presents a 5-point scale similar to those used by human assessments like the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), with 1 being tasks that are easy for AI systems to complete and 5 being those which are beyond human mastery and eventually qualitatively superhuman.

Presently, AI systems perform at levels 2-3 in nearly all nine scales of the AI Capability Indicators, with higher performance on knowledge and reasoning tasks than on tasks involving physical motor systems directly (e.g. vision or handling objects). This shows that AI systems are far from replicating all human capabilities. AI systems continue to lack deep understanding of speech to perform sophisticated language tasks built on common sense knowledge and complex reasoning (OECD, 2023[47]). In mathematics, AI systems remain well behind human capability. As yet, no AI system can reliably solve basic common sense maths word problems (Davis, 2023[48]). However, it is difficult to predict the future development of AI systems, and the kinds of tasks in which it will advance more quickly.

Social and emotional skills are frequently included in the curriculum expectations for students by the end of upper secondary

Research shows that a student’s social and emotional skills – how they think and behave – matter for their academic outcomes, and life outcomes more generally (Steponavičius, Gress-Wright and Linzarini, 2023[49]; OECD, 2024[50]). Definitions and understanding of social and emotional skills are wide-ranging across individuals, contexts and systems. This report adopts the definition of social and emotional skills used by the OECD’s Survey on Social and Emotional Skills. Social and emotional skills are individual characteristics that are: expressed in repeatable patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours; manifested in maximal behaviour more than typical behaviour (and therefore distinct from personality traits); dependent on situational factors (e.g. task context, fatigue); subject to developmental change and genetic predispositions; teachable/responsive to intervention; and are predictive of key life outcomes. Social and emotional skills are conceptually distinct from foundational cognitive processes (e.g. visual processing, attention, memory retrieval) and academic skills (e.g. literacy, numeracy) (Steponavičius, Gress-Wright and Linzarini, 2023[49]). Social and emotional skills are also different from technical and specific job-and-occupation skills that young people may be developing in upper secondary, dependent on the education programme they attend.

In seeking to develop and support young people for life during and after school, education systems often focus on values and attitudes, alongside social and emotional skills. While skills refer to how capable someone is at enacting a competency, values and attitudes relate to why they choose to act in certain ways. Values and attitudes encompass dispositions, orientations and motivations that activate and direct skills in a given context.

Results from the OECD’s Survey on Social and Emotional Skills show that 15-year-old students’ social and emotional skills as measured by the survey are associated with school grades. For example, students who report higher task performance skills, especially achievement motivation and persistence, and curiosity tend to achieve better grades in reading, mathematics and arts and are late for, or skip, school less often (OECD, 2024[50]). Reflecting the importance of social and emotional skills, most OECD countries now include expectations for these skills in their upper secondary curricula. Social and emotional skills feature, in some capacity, in most country curricula across the OECD. Social and emotional skills constitute explicit goals in the majority of countries for what an educated person is considered to be (OECD, 2020[3]). Across the education sites and locations participating in the OECD Survey of Social and Emotional Skills almost all (14/15) included social and emotional skills in their stated goals of education and over half (8/15) include social and emotional skills in their student assessment frameworks or qualification requirements (OECD, 2024[51]).

While this report adopts the definitions set out above, it is important to note that these are not the only definitions of social and emotional skills. Across and within different systems, individuals and organisations often hold different views of social and emotional skills. These different views make social and emotional skills inherently challenging as concepts to be taught at school and even more challenging to assess.

Values and attitudes are integrated into and across learning expectations

With examples dating back to ancient Greece, education has long been a site for transmitting morals and developing certain values and “qualities of spirit” amongst young people (Laurie, 1894[52]). Today, the interconnectedness of our world, where our actions carry profound significance not just for the immediate context but across the globe, makes many feel that school has an even greater role to play in preparing young people to thrive globally. In 2018, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) developed the multi-dimensional construct of global competence. Global competence is based on a combination of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values successfully applied to global challenges and intercultural situations with people who are perceived to be from a different cultural background. It integrates respect for diversity and socially responsible actions for collective good (OECD, 2020[53]).

Reflecting the expectation that education systems play an active role in preparing young people to thrive in a diverse, interconnected world, several OECD countries now explicitly include values such as respecting others, respect for diversity, social responsibility, human rights and cultural awareness in their national curricula (OECD, 2021[4]). For example, the Curriculum for Wales (United Kingdom) is oriented around ‘four purposes’ of education, which were developed based on responses from the public, including children and young people (Box 1.6 discusses the Four Purposes in the Curriculum for Wales) (Donaldson, 2015[33]).

How might upper secondary certificates evolve in response to this changing context?

The progressive broadening of systems’ curricula to include cognitive skills (including higher order or complex skills), social and emotional skills and values and attitudes or ‘global competence’ creates fundamental questions for what skills upper secondary certificates and how upper secondary certificates assess these skills. Despite the move towards explicit integration of skills over the past 20-30 years in education systems across the OECD and beyond, many stakeholders – students, teachers, assessors – continue to perceive that memorisation plays a disproportionally large role in high stakes assessments in their systems. A central impetus for the formation of the Informal Working Group on Assessment and Certification as part of the Transitions in Upper Secondary Education project at the OECD was the appetite across many countries to include a wider range of skills, notably those which are important for young people’s futures, in certification (OECD, 2023[54]). The OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment, which collected information from 25 countries between 2009 and 2012, found that a common concern in many countries and research was that assessments had remained focused primarily on reproducing knowledge and applying basic skills, with less attention being paid to measuring complex skills (OECD, 2013[9]). As a result:

while the curriculum might be competency-based, the assessment system may not adequately capture many of the key objectives of the curriculum. (OECD, 2013, p. 149[9])

Over a decade on from this work, national consultations with experts, teachers and students in countries continues to reveal dissatisfaction with current high stakes assessment – which is often viewed as rewarding memory and recall rather than focusing on the knowledge and skills that young people need for the future (Campbell, 2023[55]; UN, 2023[56]; OECD, 2023[57]; Independent Assessment Commission, 2022[58]).

Effectively assessing complex knowledge, skills and understanding in a high stakes context

There is a prevalent concern that high stakes assessment does not focus on the skills and knowledge that really matter for young people. This concern contrasts with the fact that tasks that typically contribute to certification, such as examinations, classwork and coursework can, in theory, assess a range of skills, including complex processes and knowledge (discussed further in Chapter 3). There is a gap between aspirations for what upper secondary certification should assess and what happens in practice (or what is perceived to happen). This gap reflects the unique challenges of designing, implementing and maintaining effective high stakes assessment systems. Upper secondary certificates and the assessments that contribute to them must fairly enable young people to show what they know and can do, in line with national curricula expectations, and in ways that are manageable for the system. International literature, research and discussions with policy officials suggest that there are possibly three specific challenges for such assessments to assess a wider range of complex skills:

1. Absence of authenticity

Assessments, by their nature, tend to be artificially constructed contexts which do not look or feel like the scenarios where students will use their skills and knowledge in the future. Some assessments draw on naturally occurring evidence – where evidence about a student’s knowledge and skills are assessed as part of activities that happen during a learning programme or in the workplace. However, many assessment tasks for upper secondary certification are subject to controlled conditions such as time and access to external resources for reasons of manageability, fairness and reliability (Chapter 3 and 4 discusses the assessment tasks and their conditions currently in use across OECD countries). In many cases, practical tasks that are central to the real-life application of skills – like undertaking an experiment in science, coding skills in computer science and selecting source materials when undertaking research – are often absent from high stakes assessments (Independent Assessment Commission, 2022[58]). Similarly, closed-book tasks where students are required to memorise key dates, formulae or poetry can feel like such an artificially constructed context that they do not appear relevant to the world in which young people live.

In many cases, however, the absence of authenticity might not undermine an assessment’s validity and even its relevance for the future. In most cases, since upper secondary assessments do not intend to prepare or “qualify” young people to directly enter the workplace but, rather, to provide the foundations for more targeted preparation and complexity in higher education or training, highly authentic assessments are likely unnecessary. Of course, it is a challenge to accurately define what “authentic” means for any assessment that covers a broad cohort who naturally have different aspirations for the future. What is authentic for one learner may not be for another. Yet, there are aspects of authenticity, such as time pressure – which might undermine validity. Time pressured tests can reduce validity since they become an assessment in managing time and stress, which might not be related to the underlying skills and knowledge that are intended to be assessed (Gernsbacher, Soicher and Becker-Blease, 2020[59]).

2. Context dependency

Despite the increased interest in transversal and cross-curricular skills, most upper secondary assessments continue to assess knowledge, skills and understanding in specific subjects. The subject‑specific nature of upper secondary assessment can lead to the perception that young people are required to engage with large amounts of domain specific content for which they have limited use in life after school. Moreover, research suggests that skills developed in one domain are not immediately or easily transferable; just because a student demonstrates critical thinking in a science or English literature assessment, does not mean they immediately possess the skills to demonstrate critical thinking in new contexts, such as at work (Billing, 2007[60]). Yet, since upper secondary certificates focus on assessing mastery of the curriculum and since curricula are typically organised and taught by subjects, assessments are typically constrained to assessing subject-specific matter.

3. Predictability

An entirely unpredictable assessment might seem the best way to assess all round skills – individuals in unexpected scenarios will often have to draw on a range of complex skills in new and original ways. Yet, upper secondary assessments aim to assess a specific set of skills and knowledge set out in a country’s curriculum. This means that they necessarily include predictability in terms of:

• Prescribed content. High stakes assessment must cover prescribed content set out in a national curriculum. It is often impractical to assess the entire curriculum in a single assessment so while some topics might appear in every exam because they are seen to be central to overall understanding of the subject, others might be assessed with more or less regularity e.g. every two or three (or more) years.

• Skills assessed. Skills are described in a curriculum and the focus of teaching and learning during a course of study will normally be on developing those skills. Questions in high stakes assessments will typically expect students to demonstrate those same skills. It would seem unfair to expect students to demonstrate skills they have not been explicitly developing during their course of study.

• Question types and format. The format of a test itself must be fairly predictable; students have to be familiar with the structure and style of questions. When question types are too unpredictable, with unexpected questions where students are not clear what is required of them, this can undermine students’ abilities to show what they can do, thereby diminishing the test’s validity (Ofqual, 2020[61]).

The extent to which there are concerns that unpredictable questions or tasks can undermine students’ abilities to fairly demonstrate their skills and knowledge is illustrated by the media storm that can occur when high stakes assessment deviates from what is expected. In 2015, there were extensive complaints and discussion on social media and in the press in England (United Kingdom) about a question on the mathematics General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE - national certificates taken at 16) (BBC, 2015[62]). The question required basic probability, and students did not have to solve equations (unlike other questions in the maths paper) (Bellos, 2015[63]). Students’ frustration at the question likely reflected the fact that they had not previously engaged with similar questions and were not accustomed to solving similar problems. Box 1.8 discusses similar examples of students’, teachers’ and society’s anger when exam papers differ significantly from what they expect.

Box 1.8. What happens when high stakes assessments deviate from what is expected?

“What the hell was that?” – the Higher School Certificate (HSC) exam in New South Wales, Australia

In New South Wales, Australia, the HSC indicates completion of upper secondary education. In October 2023, students sitting the English paper of their Higher School Certificate were shocked to discover that the paper did not use an image as a writing prompt, as in previous years. Instead, to assess their analytical skills, students were provided with five texts – feature and opinion pieces, poems and prose – and asked to respond. Students were also confused by a question about a text by Sophie Dahl, rather than her grandfather, Roald Dahl, the well-known name in children’s literature. Thousands of young people who sat the exam complained on social media that paper was unfair and was a “nightmare” (Cassidy, 2023[64]).

Removing “killer questions” in Korea to enhance predictability

In Korea, the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) is a highly competitive national test that young people take to access higher education. In the past, the CSAT included “killer questions” which covered content from outside the curriculum and were designed to enhance the CSAT’s selective power. However, there were concerns that these questions required extensive knowledge in topics not covered by the school curriculum and were too abstract for most students. One of the consequences of the ‘killer questions’ was that many students relied on extensive private tutoring to prepare for such questions. Responding to one of the CSAT killer questions in the past, a professor of economics at Sogang University in Seoul said:

“I was dumbfounded and angry. Is there a high school student who could solve problems that are this difficult without the help of top instructors at private academies?” (Young, 2023[65])

From 2024 onwards, the Korean Government decided to remove the killer questions to ensure that the CSAT only focused on material covered in public schools. The move aims to enhance the predictability of CSAT, reducing student stress and reliance on private tutoring

Students leave the examination hall in tears – Maths Higher in Scotland (United Kingdom)

In Scotland (United Kingdom), students take their Highers – national standardised high stakes assessments – at the end of upper secondary education. In 2015, more than 14,000 people signed online petitions protesting about the difficulty of the examination and demanding that this be considered when marking. One question about a crocodile stalking its prey was found to be particularly challenging. While the question focused on equations covered by the maths specification and typically included in maths Higher papers (Knudson, 2015[66]), students were not used to the style of question, creating stress and anxiety and ultimately proving difficult for many. The specific question and overall paper reflected changes that were being phased into Scottish Highers.

Sources: Cassidy (2023[64]), These HSC exam questions stumped some NSW students How would you fare?, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/11/these-hsc-exam-questions-stumped-some-nsw-students-how-would-you-fare (accessed on 17 September 2024); BBC (2015[67]) Crocodile maths question 'was challenging', https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-34476699 (accessed on 17 September 2024); BBC (2015[68]) SQA calms 'impossible' Maths exam fears, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-32848242 (accessed on 17 September 2024); Knudson (2015[66]) It wasn't the math that made this infamous Scottish exam so challenging, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinknudson/2015/10/09/scottish-maths-test-very-challenging/ (accessed on 17 September 2024); Young (2023[65]) South Korea to Drop ‘Killer  Questions’  From  College  Entrance  Exam, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/world/asia/south-korea-csat-questions.html (accessed on 28 November 2024); Korea JoongAng Daily (2024[69])'Killer questions' absent from this year's college entry exam, says lead test writer, https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-11-14/national/socialAffairs/Killer-questions-absent-from-this-years-college-entry-exam-says-lead-test-writer/2177707 (accessed on 28 November 2024).

Too much predictability – or perceptions of too much predictability – can excessively narrow teaching and learning, even leading to memorisation. When teachers and students feel that they can accurately predict the content of an assessment, or parts of it, students might memorise pre-prepared answers to predictable questions or topics (Ofqual, 2020[61]). Such a scenario diminishes the validity of an assessment, since it is no longer assessing students’ knowledge and understanding of the content in the curriculum or their real-time analytical skills, and becomes a far narrower assessment.

“It can be good to have an assessment that you can’t memorise, where it’s not in your favour to memorise a response. Instead, you have to build your understanding through, for example, discussion in class.” Will Duffield, Inclusive Learning Officer and recent graduate of Nudgee College, Queensland, Australia

In Ireland, a review of Leaving Certificate exam papers found that, in some subjects, there was a strong perception that exam design was rewarding knowledge recall instead of higher order skills. In some cases, there was the frequent appearance of some topics, formulaic question styles and narrow coverage of the syllabus which provided scope for pre-prepared answers (Baird, 2016[70]). In England, research with experts and teachers by the exam regulator, Ofqual, tried to predict the contents of psychology, history and government and politics A level papers (examinations taken at 18). On average, the teachers were able to predict just under 40% of the knowledge and skills required to answer the psychology and history papers, and just under 50% for the government and politics papers (Ofqual, 2020[61]). At the time, government and politics papers were popularly reported to be highly predictable, so perhaps the 50% benchmark suggests that the paper was approaching too much predictability.

Do social and emotional skills have a place in upper secondary certification?

There are many challenges associated with including social and emotional skills in upper secondary certificates. Skills are demonstrated and developed across a wide variety of context and manifest in different ways for different individuals (OECD, 2024[50]). It is variability in how social and emotional skills are demonstrated across different times and contexts that makes assessing them in a high stakes context particularly challenging. Ideas of social and emotional skills are also significantly influenced by an individual’s personal context – the complex interaction of their background (e.g. gender, culture, language, geography), their experiences and personality (Denston, 2022[71]; Hayashi, 2022[72]). OECD research on challenges related to assessing social and emotional skills in upper secondary certificates identified the following challenges:

• Individuals demonstrate and benefit from social and emotional skills in different ways

• Social and emotional skills are context dependent

• Assessment techniques related to social and emotional learning can be demanding to implement and interpret (OECD, 2023[73]; Linzarini and Silva, 2024[74]).

Despite these challenges, there are arguments for including social and emotional skills in upper secondary certification in some way. First, the typical focus of upper secondary certificates – higher order thinking – is not entirely separate or distinct from an individuals’ social and emotional skills. Individuals’ behaviours, feelings and attitudes interact dynamically with their higher order thinking skills to shape how they respond to tasks and problems in real-life and assessment contexts. Even without explicitly constructing upper secondary certificates to assess social and emotional skills, all assessments at this level of education likely require some demonstration of social and emotional skills to varying degrees and in different ways.

Aside from the conceptual reality that social and emotional skills often are already included in upper secondary certification without making this an intentional feature of their design, specific reasons for including some explicit measure of social and emotional skills in upper secondary certificates include:

• Identifying how far national goals are being equitably achieved and what progress is being made over time: as for other learning goals if some groups of students or schools consistently achieve lower outcomes in social and emotional skills, this is a national policy concern. Countries also need to monitor their progress towards national goals to identify if policy interventions or changes are needed.

• Ensuring that social and emotional skills have sufficient “space” in upper secondary education: the years of upper secondary education tend to be dominated by preparation for high stakes assessment and decisions about future employment and educational pathways. These concerns can create pressure in classrooms and in students’ personal lives to maximise opportunities known to influence school success – such as revision – and limit time for broader experiences such as collaborative work, volunteering, part-time paid work and leisure time. Explicit recognition of social and emotional skills in prominent events like upper secondary certification might help to ensure that time and energy is dedicated to broader learning and enriching activities.

• Valuing diverse types of achievement: research shows that it is not just higher order thinking skills that shape individuals’ life success, health outcomes and experiences, but also their social and emotional skills (OECD, 2024[50]). However, the historical (and current) predominant focus on academic skills in upper secondary certificates creates perceptions that these are the skills that matter most in the world. This can be demotivating for students who might struggle with these skills by creating a perception early in life that they do not have the right skills to do well.

• Demand from employers: Employers often highlight the importance of young graduates’ social and emotional skills in the workplace, notably skills like resilience, communication and teamwork, with many employers shifting hiring practices to emphasise skills (OECD, 2025[75]). These skills are even more important for young people who intend to enter employment directly after school. Using certification to ensure that young people have sufficient time to build these skills and to signal how they have demonstrated them might help young people’s integration to the labour market.

What is the role of values and attitudes in upper secondary certificates?

Arguably, since education is a social construct, values and attitudes are inherently embedded in learning expectations and always have been. As more and more countries explicitly set out values and attitudes in national curricula and there is the expectation that school prepares young people to enter an interconnected world, this leads to questions around how and if those systems can and should monitor how effectively they are achieving their goals. However, while values such as respect for others, embracing diversity and social responsibility are central to the societies where most people want to live, developing a commonly agreed construct for their assessment is far more challenging. Values and attitudes are a rapidly developing and contested field, making it difficult for systems to identify concepts where there is sufficient national consensus for assessment. Similarly, the subjective nature of values and attitudes means that attaching high stakes judgements to these concepts feels inappropriate for many.

At the system level, national and international assessments like PISA might provide useful insights about values and attitudes across the student community overall without the stakes for individual students attached to upper secondary certification. In 2023, several OECD countries reported including subjects which might provide information about young people’s development of values and attitudes in their national assessments. Such subjects include religion, ethics and moral education and well-being, respectively assessed in four systems, and social and emotional skills assessed in three systems (OECD, 2023[36]).

What are the skills upper secondary certification should and does assess?

The discussion above suggests that there are largely two main groups of capacities where upper secondary certification might have a role to play (set out in Table 1.2). In the first group – knowledge, understanding and skills – the role of upper secondary certification is largely uncontested, and many upper secondary certificates currently aim to assess these capacities. The gap between aspirations for what certificates might assess (and the skills that young people will need in the world) and what they do assess (and perceptions of this) leads to dissatisfaction with assessment and demands for reform. The other main group – social and emotional skills, including values and attitudes – is a far more nascent area for upper secondary certificates. Certification has historically not had an explicit role in assessing such skills and they are not the goal of most upper secondary certificates. Importantly, however, social and emotional skills, attitudes and behaviours are not divorced from knowledge, understanding and cognitive skills and so even when social and emotional skills are not explicitly included in high stakes assessments, they will be present to varying degrees. Nevertheless, with the explicit integration of many of these skills, values and attitudes in upper secondary curricula, countries must determine if they have a clear and specific place in their high stakes assessments.

Table 1.2. The place of knowledge and skills in upper secondary certification

	Knowledge, understanding and skills			Social and emotional competencies
	Recall	Understanding and analysing	Evaluating and creating	Skills	Attitudes and values
Definition	Retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory	Determining the meaning and application of concepts Breaking material into its constituent parts and detecting relationships.	Making judgements based on criteria and standards. Putting elements together to form a novel, coherent whole or original product.	Individual characteristics expressed in repeatable patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Exercised as needed (i.e. maximal behaviour) and distinct from personality traits Dependent on situational factors (e.g. context, fatigue) and are teachable.	Attitudes are individuals’ mindsets towards people, institutions, issues, behaviours and symbols. Values are general beliefs about desirable goals in life. They provide standards and criteria used consciously and unconsciously in judgements.
Explicit expectations in systems to assess these skills	Very frequent	Frequent	Frequent	Rare	Rare
Actual role in assessments for upper secondary certification at present	Common	Predictability might reduce assessments to memorisation over time	Difficulties of assessing in valid ways can reduce presence in practice	Few systems currently explicitly aim to assess these skills

Source: Krathwohl (2002[40]),, “A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy: An Overview”, Theory Into Practice, Vol. 41/4, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2; OECD (2020[3]), Curriculum Overload: A Way Forward, https://doi.org/10.1787/3081ceca-en; OECD (2019[5]), PISA 2018 Global Competence Framework, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-issues/global-competence/Handbook-PISA-2018-Global-Competence.pdf (accessed on 12 September 2025); Steponavičius, Gress-Wright and Linzarini, (2023[49]), Social and emotional skills: Latest evidence on teachability and impact on life outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1787/ba34f086-en.

This report provides an overview of how these different groups of knowledge and skills can be effectively assessed by different types of assessments within upper secondary certificates. Chapter 2 develops a matrix for the individual components of upper secondary certification – such as the assessment tasks and conditions in which students perform them – to identify which components are best suited to assessing different skills, knowledge and understanding. Chapters 3-6 apply this matrix to the reality across OECD countries by mapping the assessment components upon which upper secondary certification is based across 35 systems. Taken as a whole, this work enables policy makers to identify where there is scope to use different assessment components, and combine them in different ways, to assess the complex knowledge and skills that are important for their young people and societies.

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Notes

← 1.  Examples may be found that are binational, or compare a small number of countries, perhaps those in a single region. In the United Kingdom, for example, these are often called ‘Home International’ comparisons, for example: Ann Hodgson, Cathy Howieson, David Raffe, Ken Spours & Teresa Tinklin (2004[78]), Post‐16 curriculum and qualifications reform in England and Scotland: lessons from home international comparisons, Journal of Education and Work, Vol. 17/4, 441-465, https://doi.org/10.1080/1363908042000292038.

Other examples may examine a small range of countries in order to investigate a particular issue: for example Schmid, E. (2020[79]), Upper secondary education for youth at risk: A comparative analysis of education and training programmes in Austria, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, International Journal for Research in Vocational Education and Training (IJRVET), Vol. 7/1, April 2020, 21-44, https://doi.org/10.13152/IJRVET.7.1.2

Examples that make systematic, multinational comparisons of the design and assessment of upper secondary certification systems are rarer, though. Some have been published that focus on specific aspects: for example Baird et al (2018[81]) focuses on standard setting policies and processes, although each country case study describes the overall upper secondary assessment system to provide context for the discussion of standard setting. Kelleghan and Greaney (2020[80]) comprehensively set out issues and considerations around public examinations, but their focus is not on the design of upper secondary certification, they do not consider assessment types that are not examinations, and they do not attempt to provide a systematic map of country practices. The OECD has also published some work, notably Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment (OECD, 2013[9]).

← 2.  The role of assessment information for accountability and system monitoring purposes are discussed, for example in OECD (2013[9]) as well as elsewhere.

← 3.  Across the policy and academic literature on certification, there are numerous typologies of the purposes and uses of certificates. For example, in the policy literature, CEDEFOP, the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, identified 40 different purposes and functions of qualifications (CEDEFOP, 2010[77]). In the academic literature, (Newton, 2007[76]) set out 18 decision-making uses of assessment. Such detailed taxonomies have been developed to illuminate specific debates that are beyond the scope of this paper.

← 4.  For convenience, we will shorten this to ‘Certifying knowledge’, but in modern curricula, educational programmes, and certification mechanisms, the purpose almost always encompasses knowledge, understanding and skills.