On the face of it, the jump in graduation rates from Berkeley Institute and CedarBridge Academy is very good news.

For the record, the 22 percentage point increase from a 58 percent graduation rate in 2006 to 80 percent in 2007 (not 30 percent as reported on Saturday) reported by Minister of Education Randy Horton on Friday, is substantial, and broadly mirrors the graduation rate reported by the schools themselves at the end of term, which showed an 82 percent rate.

This newspaper took a fair amount of criticism when it reported those results this summer for jumping the gun on the results before the Ministry had the opportunity to analyse them.

But now the Ministry itself – having previously warned that the final result would not be as high as those released by the schools – has released graduation results that are virtually identical, in spite of the fact that Ministry officials claimed then that last year's Ministry figure was based on all students who entered Senior Four, while the more recent schools figure only included those who completed the whole year.

Mr. Horton rightly praised the schools, and gave some reasons for why there had been such a dramatic improvement. Nonetheless, and without taking away anything from the efforts of the teachers and students, the same questions that this newspaper asked in the summer and Shadow Education Minister Dr. Grant Gibbons in yesterday's Royal Gazette still stand.

One question is why there has been a ten percent jump in the graduation rate for the 2005-6 academic year, from 48 percent reported last September to 58 percent now. One can only surmise that the rise is accounted for by students who started Senior year 4 in 2005-6, but did not graduate until this summer, or that there has been a major change in methodology.

That may also explain why the number of students listed as being in S4 fell from 309 in 2005-6 to 213 in 2006-7. Assuming there was not a 25 percent drop in enrolment, where did those students go? One clue is that Ministry officials again said in the summer that some students were being held back in S3 if they were not ready for S4. If so, this newspaper supports the move, but it needs to be explained.

Even allowing for that, it is hard to believe that the students improved so much, especially when, as noted by Dr. Gibbons, the scanty Terra Nova assessment test results also released on Friday showed little improvement, and stated that of the 24 areas used to measure development in core subjects, only nine were satisfactory.

It is true that the BSC and the Terra Nova tests are different, with the former being closely tied to the local curriculum while the latter is purely an assessment test. But one or the other is not working if the results are so starkly different. In fact, the raw results are not different. Although the graduation rate soared, the actual number of students graduating last year fell, from 179 in 2005-6 to 170 in 2006-7. If you don't believe this, do the maths.

It simply does not add up, especially given the failing grades assigned to most schools in the Hopkins Report, which was conducted in the same school year. One would expect that the extra effort made by the senior schools with S4 students in the past year would help them to improve, but a 22 percent increase is hard to accept, especially for a system that was being described as being in crisis just months ago.

That raises the uneasy spectre that marking for the BSC has become easier in the last 12 months. If that's the case, and this newspaper prays it is not, then the only people who lose are the students who passed the exams, and may now find that their certificate is worth far less than they thought it was.