Education Minister Randy Horton had some good news to impart last week when he announced the graduation results for the Island's two Government senior schools.

On the face of it, the results were a major improvement on past years.

For students who started senior year four, they were particularly good, as 96 percent made it to graduation. This compares to 81 percent in 2007 and 58 percent in 2006. So the schools and the Ministry have good reason to be pleased; these are dramatic improvements.

The more important statistic concerns the percentage of students who entered Senior Year 1 and graduated within the four-year time period.

Here, 71 percent graduated, compared to just 44 percent in 2007.

Mr. Horton attributed the improvements to closer monitoring of student progress, which enabled teachers to identify and intervene with students who were falling behind.

And he also praised school principals Kalmar Richards at CedarBridge and Michelle Simmons at Berkeley for spending more time in classrooms monitoring teachers and holding them accountable for their performance.

Certainly since the Hopkins Report was released, there has been a clear change in the mindset of the senior schools, and both principals publicly took on board the need to become more involved in the delivery of education to students as opposed to being "just" educational administrators.

For those efforts, the principals, teachers and students deserve praise.

However, it is the duty of the media to exercise a healthy scepticism, and these dramatic improvements seem almost too good to be true, not least because they are so much better. That raises the question of whether standards have been lowered or marking has become easier.

A 15 percent (in the case of the final year trend) or a 27 percent increase (for the four-year trend) in graduation rates over one year is a remarkable jump by almost any education system's standards.

What's worrying is that the same improvement has not been seen in the results from the Terra Nova aptitude tests which are conducted up to the Senior 2 level. If students were making such marked improvements in their final years, one would expect that this would be reflected earlier as well. But the improvements at these levels, such as they are, are pretty marginal.

When between 70 and 90 percent of students who on average rank at or below the median level of US students in S2 then graduate, one has to question if the last two years of senior school are really producing such dramatic improvements – and if so, why the same teaching methods are not being used in the rest of the education system.

It is also worrying that the results for the GCSEs taken by public school students have still not been released, since that would give another benchmark against which to measure the graduation results.

If they showed dramatic improvement as well, then the graduation performance would be more credible as well.

Comparisons with international exams and benchmarks are also important because they give a meaningful comparison to the Bermuda graduation standard, which many in Bermuda, let alone the rest of the world, are unfamiliar with.

None of the above should be taken as a reflection on the students or on the quality of their work, since they can only do what is asked of them.

But if graduation from a Bermuda secondary school is to be taken seriously, it has to have some validity. That means that when results soar, as they have done this year, the actual performance of the students should have soared as well. We hope it has.