Students' overall performance in the written paper of the Systems of Knowledge examination in the first 2018 session was poor, leading to a higher percentage of failure grades (F) than recent years.

The disappointing results were noted in spite of a lower pass mark being set, the Matsec Support Unit said. 

In a statement, it said it had received a number of complaints from candidates who failed the examination.

In practically all cases, the complaints came from candidates who obtained a good or very good mark in the project, which has a weighting of 40% of the global mark.

They reasoned that it was hard to believe that they did not acquire "the few remaining marks" from the written examination to pass since they assumed that the pass mark was always less than 50%.

But the criteria for a pass grade was that candidates needed a pass in the written paper to obtain an overall pass grade, Matsec said.

A preliminary look at the statistics of marks obtained in the four questions that the candidates were required to answer indicated that candidates seemed to be concentrating on studying only one or maybe two of the four sections of the syllabus and providing poor answers to the other two or three sections.