Sweden’s schools minister Lotta Edholm told public broadcaster SVT that the inquiry was intended to help solve “the big problems we have with grade setting”. 

Edholm has appointed Magnus Henrekson, professor at the Research Institute for Industrial Economics, to lead the inquiry, which will look at whether it makes sense for Sweden to return to centralised grade setting from the current system, where students’ grades are set by their own teachers. 

Henrekson said that he aimed to look at the old centralised grading system and the challenges to reinstating it. 

“Historically Sweden had this and that’s what we’re going to look at,” he said. “How did it work in Sweden in the old days, and is it old fashioned and unusable today or are there aspects we could take up now and modernise,” he told SVT. 

The Swedish Teachers’ Union published a survey on Wednesday which found that six out of ten teachers had been pressured to give higher marks to students than they felt were merited, with the pressure particularly high in privately owned free schools. 

Other agencies, researchers and institutions in Sweden’s education sector had repeatedly highlighted the problem with grade inflation, known in Sweden as glädjebetyg, literally “joy grades”.  

Lars Strannegård, head of the Stockholm School of Economics, has even floated the idea of his university launching its own entrance exam as it can no longer trust the grades with which students leave upper secondary school. 

The Swedish Schools Inspectorate also recently published a report that found that head teachers in Sweden generally had a poor grasp of whether their students were receiving higher grades than they deserved. 

Henrekson is expected to submit his proposals on February 21st 2025.