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PISA is itself a standardized test though. Admittedly it's low-stakes for individual students since it isn't part of your grade, so you could hypothetically have a model where South Koreans are "studying for the test" which helps them on that individual standardized test but if they were spending that time on more holistic learning it would be dramatically more effective on standardized tests they haven't bothered to study for, but I'm dubious. It's not like students know what is going to be on the test that exactly. Or at least I assume not, I've never actually looked into the practice tests that "cram schools"/hagwons have.
Looking at actual PISA scores I assume he's talking about 2018, in 2022 there's more of a gap since Finland's score dropped by 74 and South Korea's rose by 11.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
I haven't looked into how much of this can be explained by changing racial demographics. A quick search finds this page saying it can't be explained by that because only 7% of Finnish students are immigrants, but that only includes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Actual racial data would make things easier, I know the U.S. collects racial data for PISA tests, allowing this interesting chart, but Finland might not. In any case that last chart also shows U.S. whites matching South Koreans, which seems to support the point that either all those extra hours don't make much of a difference to PISA scores or they're doing something very wrong to render them ineffective. Come to think of it I wonder if anyone in those east-asian countries has done randomized control studies on the effects of cram-school enrollment.
Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there. I wouldn't rule out there being some difference in IQ-mediating genes between races because it would be extremely weird if there was net zero selection effects on intelligence everywhere, but I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds. That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage. Someone on the motte once suggested breeding brahmins and Ashkenazi's to see what would happen and I have to admit that it would be the funniest possible twist if actually mass immigration was because some secret society of benevolent galaxy-brained racists decided to take the idea of eugenicizing their way to peak human performance seriously, instead of constraining themselves to nazi dog show fanatic inbreeding retardation.
I'd assume it's a selection effect. Think Amy Chua the Tiger Mother marrying a Jewish law school professor. Assortive mating is being driven by higher education and people moving to cities. Cities and colleges are both more racially diverse than towns/neighbourhoods.
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Exactly. Korean tests are, by their very nature, actually not good at assessing intelligence. It's all multiple choice. You can't do writing as multiple choice, you need an essay response to assess real comprehension. But if there's an essay then it becomes subjective and open to endless appeals and lawyering, whereas multiple choice is consistent, uniform and totally fair. Just get the right answer loser!
I remember having to study the 'theme' of 'belonging' in some awful book English teachers probably think is profound. That did not help me understand or wield English any better. The only way to get better is to read and write widely, not obsessively study a single text at 10x the intensity of what I was doing just because it's on the test.
The preliminary rounds of the British Mathematical Olympiad are multiple choice. The later rounds move to written solutions because some of the questions require you to come up with a formal proof.
The multiple choice sections of the science O-levels (the more demanding age-16 qualification that was dumbed down and replaced by GCSE) were the first part to go because they were notoriously the hardest part of the paper.
The LSAT reading comprehension questions, which are notoriously effective at actually testing understanding, are multiple choice.
You absolutely can assess intelligence, real comprehension, ability to apply knowledge etc. with a well-designed multiple choice test. What you can't assess is the ability to make arguments or tell stories. A subject like history has to be tested by essay writing because the skill history teaches is about is making arguments. It would be an interesting exercise to replace one-third to one-half of a history exam with a multiple choice test asking LSAT-style questions about a set of primary documents and a (real or cod) extract from a piece of modern historiography drawing conclusions from them. I think it could be even harder than "write 3 essays in 3 hours with a single page of printed notes and no electronic devices".
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Not much of a comment on the rest of your post- I broadly pretty much agree and appreciate the exponentiation on my point- but I think a huge supermajority of Finnish immigrants are very recent, so all of them are first or second gen.
I suppose it's possible that there was some large Sami-Finn fertility differential that opened up exactly the right time ago, but my guess is that the Sami don't have scores that much lower than the Finnish majority anyways. My guess would be changing teaching practices with bad results, but I don't think we have the data to really tell.
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I don't think this really means anything. It certainly doesn't imply that 'actually the US education system is a good as X's'. If you let all the other countries filter out their historic underclass then they'd probably go up as well. Whatever reason you ascribe that underclass status to, it has to be at least partly self-reinforcing a la Ogbu.
I have a genuine question- most of continental Europe uses a three tier education system with kids destined for college, trade school, and unskilled labour literally in different schools. Do European countries administer the PISA test to all levels of school or only the gymnasia? If the latter, it would have much the same effect as only testing middle class white kids in the US.
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