Shanghai students top international test

Shanghai students topped the rankings for reading, math and science in a standardized test given to about half a million high school students from 65 countries and regions last year, the test's organizer announced Tuesday.

The test, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) administers every three years, aims to discover how much 15-year-old students have learned and how well they can apply that knowledge to unfamiliar problems, according to the OECD report on the 2012 PISA.

Around 510,000 students from the OECD's 34 member countries and 31 other countries and regions took part in the latest test.

Shanghai students scored 613 in math on average, outperforming second-place Singapore by 40 points. More than 86 percent of Shanghai students had scores above 494, the average score for students from OECD countries, according to a report by the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences.

Shanghai also had the largest proportion of "top performers" on the math test among the participants. It also had the smallest proportion of students with poor performance on the test - 3.8 percent - compared with an OECD average of 23 percent, the report showed.

In reading, Shanghai students scored 570 on average, ahead of second-place Hong Kong, whose students attained a mean score of 545. Shanghai's mean score for science was 580, beating Hong Kong for first place.

A total of 6,374 students from 155 middle schools in Shanghai were chosen as a representative sample for the city, according to the local test organizer. They took the tests on April 13, 2012.

The local organizer recognized the difficulty in using a standardized test to compare different-sized countries and regions, but "given that Shanghai has a population of 24 million, which is more than the overall population of some European countries, the OECD accepted Shanghai's application," said Lu Jing, co-national project manager of the Shanghai PISA Center.

The OECD divided the students into different subsets in which an independent random sample was chosen so that the sample of test-takers was representative of all of the city's eligible students.

"Shanghai's students clearly outperformed their counterparts around the world in the tests," said Zhang Minxuan, head of the Shanghai PISA Center. "Shanghai, as one of the most developed cities in China, by no means represents the country as a whole. However, the test results did provide valuable information for policymakers and educators about how to effectively educate young people."