The study examines the final examination performance of students attending a state secondary school for boys. The multivariate analysis of the grades of more than 500 students over a period of fifteen years has yielded significant findings. On the one hand, contrary to national trends, students belonging to the Reformed Church achieved the highest results at this institution. On the other hand – perhaps less surprisingly – the sons of higher-status parents per- formed significantly better in their examinations. Another important outcome is that the longer a student studied at the school where the final exam was held, the greater their chances of graduating with outstanding results. These findings highlight the distinct character and formative role of individual schools as institutions of education and cultural transmission, which suggests that this institutional function should be considered as an independent factor in future analyses of similar datasets.

Nincs absztrakt.

The study focuses on the customary laws related to serf inheritance in Hungary and on the practice developing along these laws in the first half of the nineteenth century. By means of an example of a German-Hungarian settlement, the study illustrates how practices of inheritance and entirely different customary laws, i.e. a German custom of impartible inheritance and a Hungarian custom of partible inheritance, finally converged. Employing contemporary family histories, the author demonstrates how the system of the property transmission between generations of local Hungarian serfs had been modified and how certain elements of impartible inheritance appeared in practice. Due to both demographic and accidental factors, this process took place in each family in a distinct pace. Consequently, it is far from obvious whether a new, uniform order of inheritance resembling the German impartible system was finally established.