EricReply toJuanito
@Jim: pretty clear you don't know much about education or #$%$ment. His point doesn't prove that Thailand scores close to the U.S. because it doesn't provide any context for what 54 points is, relative to the rest of the world. If the international averaged score is 120, then a 54 point disparity indicates something quite a bit different than if the international average is 520. The PISA tests cover Math, Science and Language Arts. If Juanito's numbers are averaged across those three subject areas then a population that scores really highly in vocabulary and grammar and lower in Math is showing something completely different than a population that does the opposite, even if they both end up with the same average score.
Comparative international testing for Language Arts is impossible to make meaningful from the get go because we speak, wait for it, different languages, which makes much of the criteria different depending on what you are testing. English, for example has a much broader vocabulary, rife with synonyms, than many other cultures. It is impossible to achieve any more specific objective #$%$ment than "literate" or "illiterate".
Math is equally hard to #$%$ objectively since there is no international agreement on curriculum focus. Some cultures stress calculation and rote memory others stress conceptualization, and whichever skill you test for, you leave someone at a disadvantage.
As I said in my first post, your thinking is exactly the type of problem created by these little factoids. You can try and look at these numbers in the most simplistic way possible to make some kind of indictment about the education in ANY culture, or a competition over some non existent system of points, but the professionals that understand this stuff don't put much faith in one sentence sound bites of what is actually a very complicated and deep set of data.
