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PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD
- tokai 10d agoGreat. With later and later retirement dates, its important that the younger generations are easier to compete with. /s
- squishington 10d agoThat's quite funny, but the new recruits at my work place are super smart and full of piss and vinegar. Much more motivated than some of the older workers. The problem is that they will work lots of unpaid overtime, and they have no idea about work boundaries and being exploited by employers.
- myrmidon 10d agoDepending on the education/age of new recruits, you might not have seen much of the, younger, lower scored cohort, because the sharp performance drop only really started after 2018 (so the oldest affected people are around 22).
- squishington 10d agoYou're right. I suspect there are class factors at play too. A lot of education happens in the home when you're privileged.
- andai 10d agoSounds like they're trading excess energy for accelerated development. Where do I sign up?
- squishington 10d agoThe excess energy dissipates when you realise the commensurate rewards don't materialise, after a few years. But if you also have family wealth, it doesn't matter so much.
- jpgvm 10d agoDepends on how well they translate that effort into promotions or company switches into better positions. I averaged around 18mo to either a promotion or a move in my 20s, mostly off the back of working harder (to get the promotions/comp increases) and working smarter (to work out when they aren't coming and jumping somewhere else). If this makes sense for someone has a lot more to do with their ambition/desire and ability to work the system than anything else. It also helps a ton if you are also legitimately very good at what you do. Then it's pretty easy because you are just demanding you are paid commensurate with impact. Simply doing overtime and having hustle doesn't cut it though, you actually need to be able to leverage it into career progress or it's just wasted life.
- lentil_soup 10d agoon the other hand, they'll be taking care of us when we're old :(
- delis-thumbs-7e 10d agoMaybe, but the nurse taking care of you at old people home won’t be able to read your prescrition or count you the correct amount of medicine. You might as well throw those meds in the sink, since the prescription will be written by some transformer model anyway.
- a2ff6eeb0 10d ago[flagged]
- dumberquestions 10d agoThe decline started in early to mid 2010's, this has little to do with AI.
- loloquwowndueo 10d agoDunno man, the articles ai writes are empty cardboard crap, and the code it produces is hot garbage. “Cleaner upper of AI messes” might be a good future skill to have.
- AdamN 10d agoAs has been said before we've been cleaning up garbage code for generations and that doesn't look even close to changing anytime soon.
- jahller 10d ago100%, does it matter if I cleanup the mess of another dev or of an AI? I don't think so.
- loloquwowndueo 10d agoCan other devs spew out crap at the same speed at AI? Cleaning up fifteen 10kloc pull requests per day? Yeah didn’t think so.
- AdamN 7d agoThat's why you have agents to clean the code written by the other agents.
- lordnacho 10d agoI don't think you can dismiss the output quality so easily. Give yourself a few hours to write out some code in the old way. Can you really tell me that you could not have done a better job with AI in the same time? Eg, implement chess or poker games. Or write a component like a Swiss table. It's not obvious to me that AI produces bad work at all.
- nntwozz 10d agoAt Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg Sweden 80% of the students would pass the entrance exam in the 60s. These days it's reversed, only 20% pass. I was told this was the case around 2005 when I studied there. The exam has not changed in difficulty.
- tsimionescu 10d agoWhat's the difference in how many people apply?
- samudrijan 10d ago^^^ case in point.
- adrianN 10d agoWhat percentage of the population is expected to get university education today vs the sixties?
- Forgeties79 10d agoAlso, is a 1960’s test that hasn’t substantively changed a good metric? Maybe it is, I honestly don’t know, but I’d be curious to see the content before assuming it’s a useful benchmark.
- mcphage 10d ago> The exam has not changed in difficulty Has what students are expected to know changed since the 60s? For instance, have there been any, I dunno, new developments in technology over the past 60-odd years?
- yobbo 10d ago> Has what students are expected to know changed since the 60s? No, basic algebra and calculus has not changed.
- lordnacho 10d agoThe decline seems to have started in the 2010s. Makes me wonder if this is connected to Jon Haidt's ideas about the impact of social media.
- andai 10d agoLast I heard it started in the 90s. Although a lot of horrifying graphs do have their inflection point the year the iPhone came out.
- yorwba 10d agoIf you're referring to the few-point difference between 2012 and 2018 in the first chart here: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... I think that's more likely to be statistical noise. Keep in mind that PISA was originally normed to a mean of 500 and standard deviation 100. Even the more obvious drop after 2018 (I blame the pandemic) down to a mean of 466 on the reading test in 2025 isn't all that huge in absolute terms, though definitely statistically significant with the large sample they have.
- lo_zamoyski 10d agoA factor, certainly, but culture, including the culture around education, are arguably bigger factors (which social media is also a vector for modifying; medium is the message and all that). Social and cultural expectations and conventions are extremely important. Even in supposedly laissez-faire Western countries where traditional cultural expectations have withered to the point of laxity, people still live their lives according to convention and expectation, even if those conventions and expectations are increasingly vulgar and dictated by powerful interest. (Indeed, the fertility crisis is determined largely by patterns of convention. It used to be that, for most people, it was expected that you would marry and have children earlier rather than later. Now, our cultural expectations actually penalize that kind of behavior. You're supposed to "find yourself", "play the field", or "build up your career" first.) Human beings operate more by convention than by moral reasoning. Society needs an environment demands good things from them. Even when we know what the right or good course of action is through moral reasoning and discernment, it is very helpful for social convention and culture to support those choices. The law is also traditionally a source of guardrails that help people attain better lives.
- kmitz 10d agoPISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI. See graphs on PISA 2025 homepage : https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers. Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep screens and AI solutions out of classrooms. That's not solving everything but at least students would be given a few hours window of de-brainroting everyday. I'm open to accept that AI can have a positive impact on education but people and tools are apparently not ready and for the moment using it is a net negative.
- jfim 10d agoThe breakdown for AI usage is four categories though, not three. While the first three are negatively correlated with increased usage, the one for using AI "to help me learn" is much more flat when it comes to usage frequency.
- zulban 10d agoSloppy conclusion about edtech startups. If everyone is hiring a "tutor" to just do their homework for them, that doesn't mean that all tutors are bad.
- goalieca 10d agoThere’s many books and established schools of thought about computers being terrible for learning even before the latest wave AI edtech nonsense. Simply put, there’s nothing better than old school pen to paper.
- rtkwe 10d agoThe biggest speedbump to that is teacher time. Grading and returning worksheets for students is a huge unpaid time sink for teachers.
- blululu 10d agoFraming this as a pattern across the entire industrial world is a bit misleading. Looking through the data at Math Scores since 2015 shows big country level split: Japan: -3 S Korea: -1 Singapore: +1 Taiwan: +9 --- Germany: -45 France: -38 Sweden: -33 US: -10 This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently than their East Asian counterparts and stop pursing those actions as national policy *edit for formatting
- amadeoeoeo 10d agoI see news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media. Given the big gap between the east and the west... does anybody know if these are somehow less used/abused in asian countries? Any other reason why this gap might happen? Thanks
- nixon_why69 10d agoLiving in one Asian country, phone scrolling still happens with adults but kids get a lot of homework and definitely do it. Honestly excessive amounts, quantity over quality but at least studying is happening. If some third type of country didn't do doomscrolling but ignored their homework to play outside, that's better than scrolling but it's still not homework.
- samudrijan 10d agoAt what age does the homework kick in for kids growing up in Asia?
- nixon_why69 10d agoSpeaking for China specifically, and this is all word of mouth since my kids are at a posh international school (apply hate appriopriately): Elementary school is 8-5, longish day but not too bad on homework. Middle school (grades 6-9) there's been a recent drive to have less homework so they stay till only 7:00 (!) doing it at school and only a little take home done between dinner and bed. High school is your life revolves around homework, everyone realizes it's counterproductive to learning but they're all stuck in this trap grinding for the big exams that will shape the rest of your life. Key word neijuan. Actual Chinese (and other asian countries) can chime in where I'm mistaken.
- rayiner 10d agoThe U.S. scores are interesting. On page 28, look at the column that says "Share of top performers" (in science, reading or mathematics): https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2026/09/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_5265bfb1/73451bc5-en.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report.... The U.S. is at 17.8% top performers, well behind Japan and Korea but around the same as Canada and Switzerland. But the U.S. is significantly ahead of the big EU countries: Germany is at 14%, France is at 9.8%, Italy is at 10.1% and Spain is at 7%.
- idoubtit 10d ago> The U.S. scores are interesting. Unfortunately, those scores are not reliable. It is a recurring problem with the USA for the PISA studies. The preliminary chapter explains why data has lower confidence is some places. For the USA, there were many problems, including political reluctance in some states or schools, that lead to uncontrolled biases. Notably, the ratio of unreachable children is 40 %, twice more than their upper limit for valid results.
- rawgabbit 10d agoI found this nugget on page 315. It seems to say the OECD acknowledges students are just blowing off this test. For most students, PISA is a low-stakes assessment: they can refuse to participate in the test with no negative consequences and do not receive any feedback on their performance. There is a risk, therefore, that students do not do their best on the test; and that they behave differently from what they would do in other circumstances. ...In most countries/economies, students reported making less effort on the test in 2025 than in 2022 and in 2018: on average across 35 OECD countries, the difference corresponds to -0.5 points on the 10-point scale (compared to 2018; and -0.3 points compared to 2022) (Table I.A1.1). Meanwhile, the proportion of students who indicated that they invested very little effort in the PISA test increased from 3.5% to 5.4%. There is also this strange entry here(https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en/full-report/trends-in-reading-scores-over-three-pisa-cycles-2018-2025_3fb6c775.html#section-d1e67955-ba3adebb21 https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...). In this section, the analysis focuses on two types of incorrect responses that can be identified on most, if not all, items: skipped responses (item responses left blank, in-between non-missing responses); and hasty responses (item responses that were not scored as correct, and on which students spent less time than the fastest, yet accurate respondents). More precisely, a “minimum threshold” of time effort required for each item was defined as the 1st percentile of the (unweighted) distribution of response times among all respondents who solved the item correctly, across all participating countries and economies.2 This means that only 1% of all full-credit respondents were able to respond to the item in less time, and 99% of full-credit respondents spent longer than this threshold. The minimum threshold of time required was increased to 10 seconds in all cases where, mostly because of correct guess answers, more than 1% of full-credit respondents had provided the correct response in less than 10 seconds. Respondents who did not obtain a full-credit score on the item, but who spent less time than this threshold, are considered to have given a hasty, speeded response (as defined, a “skipped” response may also be a “hasty” response). Table I.A1.12 shows how the proportion of skipped and speeded responses evolved between 2018 and 2025. A clear trend emerges: on average across OECD countries, the average proportion of hasty (incorrect and fast) responses increased significantly between 2018 and 2025. The average proportion of hasty responses increased by over 4 percentage points over the period, reaching a total of about 9%. The average increase across items of hasty responses exceeded 10 percentage points in three countries/economies (Kosovo, Dominican Republic and Bulgaria, in descending order of that increase). Similar analyses for the mathematics and science test are presented in Tables I.A1.13 and I.A1.11; analyses for math, in particular, also show an increase in the proportion of hasty responses between 2022 and 2025, with the largest increases observed in Serbia, Malta and Israel. In the PISA test, sequences of items that are left blank at the end of the test are not considered when scoring students’ answers. Similarly, in these analyses, the corresponding students and (missing) answers are excluded from the percentages of “skipped” or “hasty” respondents. Indeed, in PISA, these items are considered as if they were not administered to students, who, most likely, did not reach them. Such non-reached items are also ignored when estimating item difficulty and student performance. However, because, over time, students became more likely to skip or to provide a fast (if incorrect) response rather than to continue working on a task that they perceived as difficult, it is interesting to note that the proportion of non-reached items declined in reading, by about 2 percentage points (Table I.A1.12), on average across OECD countries.
- marsven_422 10d ago[dead]
- Zadak 10d agoYou think parents off-loading parenting to YouTube brainrot since 2014-2015 might have something to do with this? No, it must be SOCIAL MEDIA.
- Xirdus 10d agoParents used to offload parenting to streets, fields and forests for decades. I don't think the offloading is the cause. But switching the offloading provider to SOCIAL MEDIA (of which Youtube is one) might've been.
- watwut 10d agoThe modern trend is parents spending a lot more time and involvement with their kids then used to be the norm. The norm was that kid were outside unsupervised doing whatever. The expectation on parents went up rather then down.
- rawgabbit 10d agoQuote PISA 2025 was the largest assessment to date, involving 760 000 students across 91 countries and economies. What were the sample sizes in previous years and their related demographics?
- HNSheldonImpost 10d agoBecause illegal immigration, Tiktok, and "AI".
- gonzalohm 10d agoAnecdotal, but in Spain kids don't take these tests seriously. I remember when we were in school we would ask if the tests counted towards the final note for the subject and they didn't so we would just basically finish asap so we could do other things. And I think this wasn't a "just my class" kind of thing.
- JumpCrisscross 10d ago> in Spain kids don't take these tests seriously Is there evidence for this attitude not generalizing?
- gonzalohm 10d agoI don't have any other evidence, but if there are any Spaniards here I would like to hear what they think
- amadeoeoeo 10d agoSpaniard here. Yeah, not surprising — there’s a bit of a cultural fondness for sabotage, or at least for deliberately messing with things that are "official" but somehow unimportant.
- NitpickLawyer 10d agoInteresting. On page 34 of the report there's this: > Hasty responses (percentage of responses that are both incorrect and fast – average across reading items) Spain is at 9.7%, which is a bit over 8.9% oecd average.
- logifail 10d ago"English pupils have pulled ahead of the rest of the UK in international reading, maths and science tests, new data suggests, with Scotland and Wales falling further behind." Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?
- samudrijan 10d agoTake over Scotland and Wales?
- logifail 10d agoVery droll. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9834/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... "The school curriculum in England is the responsibility of the Westminster Government. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for setting their own curriculum policies."
- delis-thumbs-7e 10d agoIt seems to me, without digging further into the data, that England sucked, but Wales and Scotland (along with rest of the OEDC) sucked harder. Meaning, they fell in grades, but rose in the ranking, since the decline was less steep. However, perhaps Gove’s reforms in placing emphasis on STEM-subjects and reading finally start to have an effect.
- somenameforme 10d agoIQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation. By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'. You'd expect this to manifest in reduced test scores and reduced quality of outcomes across a breadth of fields over time paired with the inverse happening in countries seeing gains. And that does not seem inaccurate. Why this is, is an interesting question but it hits on too many taboo topics. Though perhaps rational discussion becoming taboo is itself a part of the reason. When you accept reality, whatever it gives you, you're obviously going to have a far more rational population and better outcomes than one that insists on bending reality to fit a desired narrative, even when it obviously does not. After all this is precisely what brought Greater Arabia from the center of education and learning in the world to rather the opposite. It wasn't religion, but letting ideology dominate reality instead of the other way around. [1] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-iq-scores-decline-reverse-flynn-effect/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
- karmakurtisaani 10d agoI get the feeling you want to blame "woke" ideologies for this decline. Please correct me if I'm wrong. In my opinion we just have it too easy nowadays. Too much entertainment, screens and not enough challenges to keep kids thinking they need to be as sharp as they can be.
- wongarsu 10d agoThe "Fox News" right is just as guilty of letting ideology override reason as the "woke" left. As are many other groups (most of Western politics is a bit more complicated than the US's left/right split)
- qmmmur 9d agoAs far as I can see most left wing political platforms at least have a plan to fund education unlike right wing parties which constantly seek austerity measures and general defunding of humanities and education.
- charlieyu1 10d agoHong Kong crashed hard and nobody could see why /s
- piokoch 10d agoYup, this is "inclusive education" effects, predicted long time ago by education experts. Kids with special needs (from handicapped to criminals) are thrown into regular schools and classes, making education totally inefficient. In Poland one of the best on the World system of special education is being demolished in the name of this absurdity. But this is what people voted for.
- aennassiri 10d agoThis is alarming. I believe it is probably a combination of several factors: - Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media. - App UX/UI: Many apps are designed to compete for our attention, which can gradually reduce our ability to sustain focus. - LLMs: The impact of AI is more recent and still needs to be properly assessed. However, LLMs could significantly affect attention and critical thinking for both adults and children, especially as we increasingly delegate parts of our thinking to AI models. - Changes in the education system: In France, for example, mathematics was removed as a mandatory subject for some high-school tracks for a period of time. In my view, that was a major mistake. - COVID-19: Many students experienced significant gaps in their education during the pandemic, with the effects often being more pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
- Aerroon 10d ago>- Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media. Surely this time banning things will improve test scores! Even before you get to the scores in the report, it shows what percentage of students come from schools that have banned phones. There doesn't seem to be any obvious correlation where banning phones from school gives better results. Eg Estonia averaged 520 points with 26% of students from schools that ban phones. 88.9% of students were in NZ schools where cellphones are banned, but NZ averaged 511 points. I think before we start banning more "random" things we should consider whether these bans actually produce results. Let the countries that are making these changes run their banning experiment and the rest of us should wait and see whether their scores meaningfully improve afterwards.
- aennassiri 10d agoThanks Aerroon for sharing ! Banning social media is indeed an experiment and we don't know yet how efficient it will be.
- lukeify 10d ago
- jakozaur 10d agoThe drop is not uniform; see Table I.2.6 (2022 -> 2025). Focusing on math: Stable, above OECD average: Taiwan, Macao, Korea, Estonia, United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, New Zealand Stable, around or below OECD average: United States, Slovakia, Greece, Croatia, Qatar, Montenegro, Mongolia, Mexico, Brunei Dropping, previously above OECD average: Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Latvia, Portugal, Norway, Spain, France, Hungary Dropping, around or below OECD average: Iceland, Israel, Malta, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Malaysia, Romania, Peru, Ukraine, North Macedonia Improving, all below OECD average: Türkiye, Thailand, UAE, Philippines, Jordan, Georgia, Cambodia
- delis-thumbs-7e 10d agoHere’s my five cents: It’s the damn phone. I do think that in the future we have classified today’s platform company app’s as digital drugs (similar to in addictiveness to gambling) and wonder why in the hell people let their kids get hooked on digital heroin from early age. Kids talking about brain rot are describing a real phenomenon. In Finland in 2016 (Nr. 1 in the early 2000’s) there was a reform towards what I believe is called constructivism in pedagogy, ie. kids learn by themselves and the teacher simply facilitates learning, there should be play and games as way to learn etc. There’s no evidence any of this works, but you don’t need as many teachers nor as qualified, so that’s good right? Besides, their new iPads will this them. This is an Apple/Google/whatever school now. Who needs text books? I think we simply threw a generation of kids under the buss to sell each other toys and dumb software and to keep bunch of VC’s in San Fran happy. Education started to decline, because as a society we stopped caring about education.
- jruohonen 9d agoSo sad.