Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators

[Andy Nguyen]

US educators may be stun but for many members here (specially those educated oversea), it's hardly a surprise.

In PISA Test, Top Scores From Shanghai Stun Experts - NYTimes.com

With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.

American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai — an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country — are by no means representative of all of China.

 

[bigbadwolf]

The US didn't do so bad:

In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.

In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.

For me it's an open question as to how and where to apportion the praise: Is it the Chinese educational system or the fact that North-East Asians have the highest average IQs in the world (~105 as compared to the European average of 100)? Is it nature or nurture? Only the tiny group of Ashkenazi Jews trump them, and that also more on verbal rather than mathematical and visuo-spatial.

 

[darth]

There is no mention of India.. Did they perform poorly or the test was not conducted in India?

 

[DominiConnor]

There's going to be several factors here...

Beating America at science education is like beating it at cricket, it's just not what America does. It's a nation where 40% of the population don't even believe in evolution.

As Andy says, migration is acting as a Heinlein filter.
Ironically that also boosts American figures, since it has enough immigrant kids to partly compensate for the utterly wretched state of science education.

It has reached the level that in The Simpsons a teacher can remark that her school results are remarkably good considering they have no Asian kids. When you are at that point, there is no way back.


China has almost no lawyers, but for many bright Americans this is an entirely rational choice, which means that people who might have done science choose liberal arts.

US manufacturing is of course doomed, any American smart enough to make a difference to this avoids even trying, and so it's not clear to me why a smart kid in the US should choose to pursue science. And yes you have to persuade them since the media is more hostile to scientists than it is to Nazis. At least some Nazis look cool and powerful, occasionally attractive, no scientist like that ever appears on US TV.

In China, a smart engineer / scientist kid can look forward to a job that pays more than his parents put together, and in many cases earning more than his whole village is a feasible goal. That means Chinese kids want to be scientists or engineers, and there is no peer pressure against studying science. That is very unlike the USA

A few caveats...the tests are in the People's Republic of China and I would not entirely believe the result of any education test that took place there, even if I monitored it personally. Note they said "no evidence of cheating". This is China of course there was no evidence. Given a choice between believing that the whole city of Shanghai does not actually exist, and that a Chinese exam was free of cheating, I'd be wondering if Google Earth could be hacked.

Many Chinese don't get the same education as in Shanghai, and although it is bad for them as individuals, for the PRC as a power, that doesn't really matter. If you produce far more excellent scientists and engineers than anyone else, you will succeed, and losing a few hundred million people makes little difference.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Beating America at science education is like beating it at cricket, it's just not what America does.

For decades I think there's been some sort of consensus among policy-makers, possibly tacit, that there's no need to get serious about scientific and engineering education because foreign talent can always be poached (from Britain, India, China, you name it). And this poached talent is cheaper than developing one's own, and docile to boot.

It has reached the level that in The Simpsons a teacher can remark that her school results are remarkably good considering they have no Asian kids.

It's at the level where some American universities are asking for higher SAT scores from East Asian students than from white ones -- a form of affirmative action for whites.

China has almost no lawyers, but for many bright Americans this is an entirely rational choice, which means that people who might have done science choose liberal arts.

As in Britain, there's not much of a career structure, pay prospects, and social status for scientists and engineers. So people gravitate towards law, accountancy, management, medicine.

Another reason is the egregious state of science and math education in schools. The texts and curricula are wretched; the teachers often lack in-depth understanding of their subject matter. How many math teachers this side of 40 can manually calculate square roots? Less than 20%, I'll warrant. The upshot is that many youngsters who may have a bent for the exact sciences get discouraged with their utter lack of foundation, with their lack of basic skills. From the 7th through the 12th grades, math is mind-numbingly boring, repetitive, and lacking coherence (just a bunch of topics presented with little or no motivation). Probably the same can be said for physics.

 

[euroazn]

Only the tiny group of Ashkenazi Jews trump them, and that also more on verbal rather than mathematical and visuo-spatial.

True story brah
We trump everyone at everything. =P

To quote good ol' Wiki:

Achievements

Ashkenazi Jews have a noted history of achievement in western societies.<SUP class=reference id=cite_ref-48>[49]</SUP> They have won a large number of the Nobel awards.<SUP class=reference id=cite_ref-49>[50]</SUP><SUP class=reference id=cite_ref-50>[51]</SUP> In those societies where they have been free to enter any profession, they have a record of high occupational achievement, entering professions and fields of commerce where higher education is required.<SUP class=reference id=cite_ref-51>[52]</SUP> For example, during the 20th century in the United States, Ashkenazi Jews represented approximately 3% of the population, but won 27% of the US Nobel Prizes in science, and 25% of the ACM Turing Awards (the Nobel-equivalent in computer science).<SUP>[53]</SUP>

Wiki even has a seperate article... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_intelligence


LOL

 

[Yike Lu]

I never had a real physics course until my senior year of high school. It was not even offered in 9th and 10th grade. Fortunately my genetic average IQ is 105 and not 100, allowing me to essentially not study for physics while my peers crammed desperately.

There is an interesting caveat to the nature vs nurture argument...

Cultural norms, if strong enough can influence nature over a long enough time scale. Humans as a whole have been able to selectively breed animals and plants (canis domesticus aka "domesticated wolf" aka THE DOG for example). If your culture values intelligence extremely highly, then over time partner choices will drive the average IQ in a society up.

Interestingly, as my parents tell me, it is the Western dominance over China in hard sciences and engineering over the past two centuries that drives the current emphasis on science and engineering in China. Before that time, literary achievement was emphasized more. Then the Opium Wars happened. In a sense, current Chinese culture equates excellence in science and engineering with national power and dominance on the international political arena.

 

[bigbadwolf]

There is an interesting caveat to the nature vs nurture argument...

Cultural norms, if strong enough can influence nature over a long enough time scale. Humans as a whole have been able to selectively breed animals and plants (canis domesticus aka "domesticated wolf" aka THE DOG for example). If your culture values intelligence extremely highly, then over time partner choices will drive the average IQ in a society up.

I'm not sure it's a caveat. I might suggest Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior, and Levin's Why Race Matters (Mike Levin is a professor of philosophy at CUNY). Rushton's argument is Darwinian: different environments select for different qualities. In particular, colder environments select for higher intelligence (the need to plan for winters, the need for cooperation in hunting large game). From this point of view, both culture and intelligence are corollaries of particular environments.

With regard to Jewishness, some of us were having a light-hearted discussion a few weeks back on a chess forum. The brightest of the bright seem to be Hungarian Jews (like John von Neumann in math and the Polgar sisters in chess). An English chess master C.H. O'D Alexander) apparently once said the best chess players were Russian Jews, then Russian non-Jews, then non-Russian Jews, and at the bottom, non-Russian non-Jews.

 

[euroazn]

With regard to Jewishness, some of us were having a light-hearted discussion a few weeks back on a chess forum. The brightest of the bright seem to be Hungarian Jews.

Sorry pal, Alexander was right - Russian Jews are the 1337 ones. XD



However, to get back on topic, the test also doesn't control for downright apathy. U.S students feel no pride when taking the test, unlike students from say, South Korea, who experience an entire rally to prep them for the "big moment."

 

[DominiConnor]

@BBW, I think you are right that attracting smart foreigners has been part of the mix, but that would only get you as far as neglect, I observe active hostility. The US has long had fewer people with science degrees in the higher political echelons than any other major country I can think of, and even behind quite a few minor ones.

@Yike has a good point, for 500 years the West (however you define that) has left China standing and vulnerable, rational to try and fix that. This also applies at a a personal level.
One thing Chinese people and Jews have in common is that within living memory it has been rational to hand your children to complete strangers in the hope that they might survive.

Technical skills are usually more portable than cultural ones. A smart engineer or doctor might have to take a drop in level when fleeing a tier one disaster, but will probably make a living in wherever he escapes to.

Although Europe has had all out war within living memory, for most people, it wasn't something they could easily flee from, and of course the rise of America meant that 'escape' was usually a more structured affair.

America hasn't had such events, except where immigrants bring the idea, but the ratio of recent(ish) immigrants to native born has been declining for a loong time.
Hence US kids choosing to be lawyers or alternative therapists and other things that don't port well.

 

[Yike Lu]

As far US cultural attitudes towards people with technical aptitude, part of is the fault of those technical people for not being socially apt. In my own experience, my intelligence has never been the target of hostility; any social awkwardness I may have felt was due to my own lack of ability. Any jokes were well meaning... on the lines of "When Yike dies, he needs to donate his brain to science so they can figure out how to make more of him." That said, I was very rarely an outright asshole...

But technical aptitude and social aptitude are nowhere near to being mutually exclusive. Many people know about Einstein, Hawking, and Feynman because they were "jokers as well as geniuses." They were smart but had mass appeal.

Another interesting thing at least from an IQ stats perspective is the effect of the standard deviation on the truly elite levels of intelligence.

At least one thing I've read is that women on average have higher IQ than men, but their standard deviation is lower so that at higher IQs there are much more men than women.