This study investigates the syntactic complexity of the example texts used as guides forassessment in the national tests of the Swedish upper secondary school courses English 5 andEnglish 6. It is guided by two research questions: (1) Is there a progression of increasedcomplexity between the grades assigned to the example texts, and, if so, is any specificmeasure of syntactic complexity more strongly linked to a higher grade than the rest? (2) Isthere a progression of increased complexity between the two courses, and, if so, how doesthis progression manifest itself? A set of 14 quantitative measures of syntactic complexity asidentified by the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA) are examined to answer thesequestions. The majority of the differences between the grades and/or courses represented areshown to be statistically insignificant, and the few instances of statistical significance likelyoccurred either due to a small sample size or due to a questionable tendency of L2SCA whendealing with run-on sentences. In the end, syntactic complexity as expressed through the 14measures seems to be a poor indicator of why a text received a certain grade in either of thetwo represented courses.