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Arctic Yearbook 2014
narrative style has influenced the writing in Danish, making it difficult to interpret a clear meaning.
A study of the connection between the Greenlandic students’ Danish proficiency in high school and
their grade in the second semester course Mathematics in Physics indicates, as shown in Figure 5,
that there is a correlation, although it is far from linear.
Figure 5: Grades in the course Math in Physics vs. average high school grades in oral and written Danish language for
Greenlandic students starting 2012 and 2013. The character 2 is the minimum acceptable level. Of 9 students with an
average high school grade below 5, 6 failed the Math in Physics course. Of 10 students with a high school grade above 5
only 3 failed, of which one did not show up for personal reasons.
There is a more linear relationship between the marks in mathematics and the physics course in the
engineering program and marks based on a weighted average of mathematics, physics and chemistry
marks from high school. But it is not generally the case that those who have low marks in Danish
also have low marks in math/physics/chemistry, so this cannot explain Figure 5.
Since the