This study is part of a larger research project: ”Let the right one out! -Teacher training and the induction period as gatekeepers to the teaching profession” in which the overall aim is to examine the indicators which are used to argue for a student failure, the procedures that frame such a decision and the quantity of student teachers who finally are failed in the Swedish teacher education. In the presentation the practice of failing in student teaching is linked to a current issue in Sweden: The introduction of admission tests before entering the teacher education. Based on empirical examples - nine cases of failures - the following issues are discussed: Do the examples contain possibilities to detect insufficient teacher quality “at first sight”, that is before the student has entered the program? Can knowledge of such possibilities facilitate the selection of future teacher students? If so, how?

The Swedish teacher education has, like many others, been criticized for not sufficiently enough “separate the wheat from the chaft”, i.e. to reject students who are not suitable for the profession. In response to this criticism, the Swedish government has proposed that admission tests should be (re-)introduced. These tests shall, in accordance to the Government's proposal, measure “teaching ability - not opinions or behavior”. The question is how "teaching ability" can be distinguished from “opinions and behavior" and what qualities such an admission test can detect? A re-introduction of alternative selection instruments raises both the question of how such an instrument can be constructed and sharpened and the question of what is actually meant by "teacher quality". What qualities can be detected at first sight, and what qualities can/must be improved through training?

Admission testing in teacher education goes back several hundred years in Sweden. Up until the 1970s – when the tests were abandoned – the objective was to sort out "mature" and "healthy" teachers with a "pleasant personality" (Sjoberg, 2006). In 1977 the responsibility for assessing the students’ quality, to function as a gatekeeper, was consigned to the teacher education. Both Swedish and international research (Hegender 2010; Raths & Lyman, 2003; Goodwin & Oyler, 2008) show that this gatekeeping function is unclear and complex. These studies found that poor quality is relatively easy to detect but that the assessment often has a formative character and that barriers that are set up tend to be diffuse and local. It shows that the practice of failure is complicated, time-consuming and troublesome ant that the process often assumes the guise of “counseling out” rather than to be characterized of a distinct summative assessment (Goodwin & Oyler, 2008).

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