In the South, teachers are more lenient, and the gap (in marks) with the North disappears

There is a paradox that repeats itself every year and which not even the latest education reforms have managed to prevent. We are talking about the sudden and dramatic improvement shown by students in the South during the final months of the school year, which, without fail, leads them to achieve better results in their school-leaving exams than their peers in the North. This reverses the picture painted by the spring Invalsi tests, which, just as predictably, see the North excel in the standardised tests in Italian, maths and English, whilst the South struggles.

The paradox that over 60 per cent of ‘praise’ is concentrated in Rome and the south is now well known. We at *Il Sole 24 Ore* have been highlighting this for years, and the Ministry seems to have taken note as well. This is demonstrated by the decision last week to circulate Invalsi’s regional estimates on implicit dropout rates alongside the exam results. These revealed that, even in 2026, the largest proportion of the 14,123 graduates with honours was recorded in Campania (3,018), ahead of Puglia (2,104) and Sicily (1,928). But the phenomenon is in fact more widespread and affects both the higher and lower ranges of school-leaving exam marks. This is in line with a general tendency among teachers in southern schools to be ‘lenient’.

You only need to look at the exam results from the first four years of upper secondary school to see this. Against a national average of 77 per cent passing and 5.3 per cent failing, all the southern regions (except Sardinia) have rates that in the former case, at over 80 per cent and, in the latter, well below 5 per cent (except for Campania, which stands at 5.3 per cent, in line with the rest of the peninsula). A similar picture emerges for pupils with ‘unpassed subjects’: the national average stands at 17.7 per cent, whilst the South (excluding Molise) ranges between 10.1 and 11.8 per cent.

By the time pupils reach their A-levels, this phenomenon comes to a head and the effects are even more evident. First and foremost, this is evident in the high marks. If we cross-reference the proportion of pupils graduating with marks above 90 with the percentage achieving ‘excellent’ in the Invalsi tests for Year 13 – that is, those who achieved levels 4 or 5 in both Italian and mathematics in the tests and attained level B2 (at the end of the second cycle) in English reading and listening – an almost dystopian picture emerges. The central and northern regions, according to the Evaluation Institute, hover close to or above the average (13.1 per cent), whilst the south lies well below it. The figures range from 5.6 per cent in Calabria to 10.2 per cent in Basilicata, including 6.7 per cent in Sicily, 6.8 per cent in Campania, 7 per cent in Sardinia and 9.3 per cent in Puglia.

Three months later, at A-level time, the picture is turned on its head. In Calabria, the proportion of pupils with high marks (33.1 per cent) is six times that of those achieving ‘excellent’ results in the Invalsi tests; in Campania and Sicily, it is almost four times as high; and in Puglia, three times as high. In the north, however, the ratio is reversed. This is illustrated by the contrasting performance of the ‘big’ regions of Veneto (14.9 per cent high scores and 20.6 per cent ‘excellent’ scores) and Lombardy (12.7 per cent and 20.3 per cent), or the smaller Valle d’Aosta (10.5 per cent and 17.6 per cent). In Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia-Romagna and Trentino-Alto Adige, these two categories are almost identical or diverge by no more than a couple of percentage points.