Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators

People wonder if these test scores in China are beyond the norm. But the bitter truth is that these scores are indicative of their Confucian training, not any independent thinking that a "standardized" test could evaluate.

The Chinese education should be noted for a strong emphasis on rote memorization and the regurgitation of lectures. Unlike most Western philosophies of education (e.g, Plato), the Chinese education system does not instill or encourage creativity. What you will find is that many students that have undergone a Confucian education system are extremely capable within their competent subjects, but they will have a difficult time coming up with creative solutions other than textbook solutions.

Confucianism (as I have wrote before) was adopted aggressively during the Qing dynasty, because it perpetuated the importance of respect to the state. It taught that one should respect the state, the teacher, and the parents, because if one did all three, they would naturally respect the power of the king. In short it became a way to brainwash. And predictably, most Chinese innovation during the Qing empire diminished.

You'll note that Asian countries have a difficult time creating software. A lot of software in China are clones of American counterparts. It's because Confucian thought has made it difficult for many in China to be creative.

I've personally tutored students from China, and many of them who excelled through the Chinese education system found the American university system extremely challenging. The greatest challenge for them was writing an essay. Many of their essays would read like semi-plagiarized versions of the history text, without a pervasive POV that stayed close to the middle without making a single claim. These students would often blame the essay-writing to their language abilities. I told them that even if these essays were written in Chinese, you still don't have an essay because you don't have a thesis, and the whole point of the essay was for you to take a side. And then they would ask me which was the correct side...

The point is that, yes, these test scores are very impressive. But I don't think other countries--in particular, America--are exactly boned. The one redeeming attribute is that we can have any idiot in this country think he's a genius, in some extreme cases, become a world leader, and that's the sort of mentality that will save us. Until China has a Google or Apple that can develop iOS or Android. But then again, China isn't known for having a college dropout culture, so it's hard to see if they will have a Facebook, Microsoft, or Oracle given that the cultural differences.

> This is not politically correct to say, but given the gap between white and black scores, I wonder how the US would do if you ranked it based only on white scores.

Questions of political correctness aside, this seems like some fuzzy thinking to me. Why focus on skin pigment as a distinction? Presumably because these numbers are easily available, and the categories are relatively "neat".

But why not skip all that and just use the top quartile scores? Or the top percentile?

The relentless focus on skin pigment is damaging to our thought processes as a whole, globally. It's an easy target, and it is definitely a (relatively) reliable proxy indicator for certain attributes (e.g. income, test scores). But most interesting questions (and answers) are causative in nature, and with skin color only being a proxy indicator, it seems limited to correlative questions. Also, in our civilization's more primitive and less-informed times, skin pigment was a critical distinction in both daily life and foreign policy. However, this was simply due to the lack of better or easier-to-use distinctions.

I mean, does anyone truly believe that skin pigment causes lower test scores? I doubt it. Now, do inattentive parenting and poor schooling cause lower test scores? I think so.

It may be that skin pigment correlates with poor education at home and institutionally, and it may be the only reasonable "metric" for quality of upbringing. But the focus should be on the causative force, and shortcuts that we make for practicality's sake should be broadly disclaimed at the outset.

So let's drop our vestigial attachment to skin pigment as an explanatory or causative condition. Not for reasons of sensitivity or political correctness, but for reasons of epistemological correctness.

Also: most of the "issues" that people have with skin pigment are actually judgments of culture and not appearance. Again, appearance is merely a proxy for culture, here. Note that I see nothing wrong with condemning cultures that are judged to promote or result in "bad outcomes".

One thing we should keep in mind when evaluating these scores is that there is a different cost/benefit calculation in different countries, especially for math scores.

For instance, take a look at the "best jobs sorted by high pay" (from cnn)

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestjobs/2010/highpa...

There are some techy jobs on there that do require substantial amounts of math[1] (software engineering director, actuary, computer and information scientist). However, the extremely well paid health fields listed generally require only a single year of an easier track of college calculus, and lawyers don't have to take any math at all. In China, most top government officials are engineers or scientists, whereas in the US, they're more typically poly sci majors who wen to law school.

I think that top US students have rationally concluded that you need to get pretty good at math to have access to the top jobs and positions, but that after a certain point, there's a diminishing return and an opportunity cost (ie., time is better spent on other subjects, playing sports, developing leadership skills, and so forth). Of course, this is true of all nations, but I think that the rewards for going farther with math are higher in China (and perhaps France) than they are in the US.

[1] by "substantial math", I mean educational paths that require you take the full two years of math/hard science/engineering track calculus, rather than the slower paced, one year track often offered to premed or economics students.

I did.

Mr. Schneider, however, noted some factors that may have influenced the outcome.

For one thing, Shanghai is a huge migration hub within China. Students are supposed to return to their home provinces to attend high school, but the Shanghai authorities could increase scores by allowing stellar students to stay in the city, he said. And Shanghai students apparently were told the test was important for China’s image and thus were more motivated to do well, he said.

Shanghai pop.: 19,000,000+ Finland pop.: 5,500,000+ Hong Kong pop.: 7,000,000+

The population of Shanghai exceeds the total population of NY, LA, CHI, HOU, and PHX combined.

Which student sample would you say is more diverse?

The culture in China doesn't entirely foster it. I agree China is entirely capable of producing excellent software. But that doesn't change the culture. I've breathed it when I lived in China for several months. You'll notice that college students in China are always in groups, and there is a hive mentality to decision making. The self isn't as important as the group. Espirit de corps.

Jack Ma of Alibaba spent considerable time in the US, and enlisted US friends to develop Alibaba. Many Asians that have been through Western education become extremely creative. Not that I'm saying the Western/US education system is better (it has its problems, on the entirely opposite scale), but Western university culture helps bring people to their potential, while the university culture in Asian countries is a continuation of high school (hard to get into, extremely easy to get out).

I work regularly with Chinese companies, and if you were to go to an equipment manufacturer in China, you'd notice they practically use the same designs, block diagrams, software for the same product. It's all exactly the same. You might also recall that the mandatory filtering software used by the Chinese government was plagiarized. Or the Cisco firmware. IP has serious problems in China.

Japanese cellphones, for instance, were way ahead of the curve on the merits of specs. But that isn't true anymore. Japan, like other Asian countries, have a difficult time with creativity not because they're less talented, but because the culture doesn't help bring ideas to fruition.