Finnish Adaptive Test for Secondary Education Discretionary Application

To get access to upper-secondary vocational education within the Finnish school system,
the academic record of the comprehensive school is considered as the proof of students’ aptitude.
However, in case that the academic record is missing, or it is not comparable with the other
students’ school grades, other forms of admission are required. A special case within the group
having incomparable school marks are students who have individualized education learning plan
(IEP) which in most cases means lowered learning demands compared to other students. In
students’ academic record documents IEP grading is indicated with asterix *, but, when students
apply to the upper-secondary education, this notion is ignored, and these students’ performance is
treated as regular students’ achievement. In 2016, the Centre for Educational Assessment at the
University of Helsinki therefore developed a computer-based adaptive test of learning
preparedness (PREP-T) to offer such applicants a possibility to show her/his preparedness to learn.
The PREP-T therefore produces extra information for upper-secondary institutions that are
evaluating suitability of their applicants. In this study, we examined the quality of the PREP-T in
terms of evaluating also students applying to upper secondary general track. A nationally
representative sample N = 2,739 (1,337 girls) was collected in spring 2022. Preliminary findings
based on IRT-modelling and multivariate statistics show that PREP-T, especially math and literacy
tasks, accurately differentiate students along with the grade values. However, PREP-T performance
of students with the IEP is not that unambigious with reference to their grading.