Some high schools rank high in social reputation only because many good students apply for the admission to them, while the prestige of other schools is comparatively low mainly because of the lower academic level of the applicants. The resulting difference among high schools can be reduced by requesting the students to apply for a group of several schools instead of for a single school and distribute the qualified applicants to each school within the group equally in respect to their academic level. If this system works well, the difference among schools in a group will come to the minimum, while, on the other hand, another difference will unavoidably appear among groups.
This dilemma between the individual and group differences among schools may threaten the joint selection system itself, unless some adequate measures are taken.
Nagoya City started in 1973 a new selection system, by which schools A and B formed a group, while B forming another group with C. Thus a school belongs to two groups at the same time, one group being always formed with two schools.
This articles tries to see both the extent to which this new system has been successful to solve the dilemma, and the process through which a new kind of difference, if any, may come out and develop among individual schools and/or groups of schools.
Main findings are:
(1) The academic level of the applicants is different between the two groups sharing one school, although the chance to enter the school is logically equal between the two. This difference either comes to be fixed or grows larger year by year without showing signs of decrease. In other words, the academic level of a school is more influenced by the higher-prestiged school it is linked with on the one side than the lower-prestiged school on the other.
(2) A gradual replacement of high-ranking schools has been taking place. This change seems to have been caused by the mechanisms inherent to this selection as well as by the past prestige of the schools concerned.
(3) Under this system the difference of academic level among schools has been considerably reduced for these four years, but the whole pattern of ranking among fifteen schools still remain unchanged.
(4) All this suggests that the better the applicants are and the higher the school's prestige is, the greater their influence is upon the changes of the difference, and that the changes initiated in the upper part among the group gradually extends to the lower. This may be analogous to the general trend of the nation's orientation to higher academic degrees.
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