Grouping students in terms of ability and aptitude is assumed to be advantageous, given that high-performing students may be stimulated more while low-performing students may be supported more. However, studies on ability grouping often provide mixed results. Additionally, although ability grouping is a common practice in the Philippines, it has not been empirically investigated with a nationally representative dataset. Drawing on the Philippine data in PISA 2018 which contained responses from 6952 students nested in 180 schools, we found that students in schools that practice ability grouping did not perform any better than those in schools that did not engage in ability grouping. More importantly, schools which practice ability grouping had greater academic inequalities among students. Similar academic inequalities were also more prevalent for urban and more advantaged schools while less prevalent for private schools. Taken together, these results suggest the need to attend to sources of inequalities among students in a school, and to reconsider assumptions for the supposed benefits of ability grouping.

考虑到表现优异的学生可能会得到更多的激励，而表现不佳的学生可能会得到更多的支持，因此根据能力和才能对学生进行分组被认为是有利的。然而，对能力分组的研究往往提供不同的结果。此外，尽管能力分组在菲律宾是一种常见做法，但尚未对具有全国代表性的数据集进行实证研究。根据 PISA 2018 中的菲律宾数据，其中包含来自 180 所学校的 6952 名学生的回答，我们发现进行能力分组的学校的学生表现并不比未进行能力分组的学校的学生表现更好。更重要的是，实行能力分组的学校在学生之间存在更大的学业不平等。类似的学术不平等在城市和条件更优越的学校中也更为普遍，而在私立学校中则不那么普遍。总之，这些结果表明需要关注学校学生之间不平等的根源，并重新考虑对能力分组的假定好处的假设。