PISA Logic Test Rankings

[Dag]

I've been studying Japanese lately and one of the things I've come across is PISA, which stands for Programme for International Student Assesment. It's pretty interesting. What I'm specifically interested in is problem-solving test. This is a test given to 15 year olds in participating countries. It's all based on logic, so it's a pretty good indication of the capabilities of the average student in each of the participating countries - it's not cirriculum based; all you really need to do well is a brain, basic mathematical knowledge, and simple problem-solving skills.

Here are the results:

(Basically it's best to worst from left to right. Level 1 is basic problem solving ability and level 3 is "complex" problem solving ability.)

You can see the report for yourself here. Maybe nobody finds this interesting but I think it's kind of neat. Any ideas regarding the disparity?

The other thing I'm interested in is the reactions I'm getting to this I posted it over at HL2World (albeit perhaps in a slightly sardonic manner - I mentioned that there are only 11 countries below the US on the 40-some list of participants, but hey, I was just stating the facts) and it was met by countless posts along the lines of "OMG USA ROX0R WE R #1 CUZ WE CAN B0MB U!!1"

Anyway, I just thought that was kind of interesting.

(On another note, I'm new here and I've noticed that sometimes when I click reply/new topic it just sends me back to the main page - yeah, I'm logged in. What's up with that?)

[FrieChamp]

Oh hell no, please not PISA! There was a media frenzy about PISA ~2 years ago here in Germany because the German students sucked comparetively bad in the test.

And I was one of the ~30 students of my school to participate in it. We were randomly chosen, so it wasn't like the 30 best of our school and we were poorly prepared for it. We've NEVER heard of that PISA test before and maybe we would have taken a little more effort if somebody told us what impact these results have. We just thought it's some minor important, scientific test and we don't have school for 2 days to answer these silly questions. Also the students in Japan for instance were prepared for the test in class before, we were just thrown into a classroom with a bunch of papers. Poor frei

[Mazy]

Theres been alot of talk about that PISA stuff here in Denmark, everybody went totally mental because danish students arent the best, especially since Denmark is one of the countries that spend most money on their education system.

Anyway, as frie said then i somewhat doubt the quality of this test

[RD]

so where do i take this pisatest

[-Stratesiz-]

Oh I remember this one~ I find the results to be rather strange.

[DanielAragon]

i cant say im surprised taht the united stated did poorly on this thing...never heard of pisa, but i would ahve guessed tat we would do bad.