Are they just bigger schools with shittier student to teacher ratios?
There are a bunch of factors that they need to control for, which they seem to acknowledge as an area for future study.
My first thought was similar to yours, but had more to do with the amount of people in the room of the exam rather than during the term.
This was all Uni SA
So replace OP’s schools with subjects…
We looked at the results from 15,400 psychology undergraduates at one Australian university over eight years (2011–19), and across three campuses.
It’s the same course. It’s there in the article.
Fair cop, you got me.
Science coms whinge: not a single graph! Come on!
Otherwise, my own experience … exam hall exams are awful … they’re distracting, the number of people around is distracting, they’re often either cold or warm … this result makes sense.
I’ve taken exams in smaller spaces and they definitely felt more calm.
Higher ceiling means larger room. Larger room means larger class size. It’s well established that larger class sizes are detrimental to learning.
Larger halls doesn’t necessarily mean larger class sizes. I believe UniSA uses amalgamated exam halls; they fill the same hall to capacity with whatever classes have an examination requirement.
So if you live in a miners cottage with 9ft ceilings you’re destined to fail? /s
Sorry, I clarified the title and broke your joke
What was it before?
I added “exam hall”
I had exams in the building pictured at the top of the article. On one occasion it was 6°C and I struggled to write for the whole exam. That building is fucking freezing and the heaters set up around the outer walls did nothing. After the exam it took me several hours huddled in front of a heater to stop shaking. A nice warm classroom would have helped everyone.
