[ExI] How PISA surveys systematically overestimate Finland

[Aleksei Riikonen]

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 12:34 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> On 08/11/2012 14:40, Omar Rahman wrote:
>
>> They are 'over the top' socialised schools which turn many educational
>> paradigms on their heads.
>
> Well, the strange thing is that they are not *that* different from the
> Swedish and Norwegian socialised schools. But our countries do worse
> on Pisa for some reason (still in the top quartile, though).

Yes, you are right, our school system here in Finland is very similar
to the other Nordic countries, and actually it has been shown that
PISA surveys systematically overestimate the quality of Finnish
schools, though for some reason I've never seen this rather conclusive
analysis discussed anywhere in mainstream media, either here in
Finland or elsewhere:

http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/

It boils down to the Finnish language having certain properties which
cause the questions in PISA surveys to be easier when phrased in
Finnish.

This explanation is extremely strongly supported by the fact that we
also have a Swedish-speaking minority and Swedish-speaking schools in
Finland, and those schools get lower scores than the Finnish-speaking
schools (similar scores as other Nordic countries), despite them being
part of the exact same school system and the Swedish-speaking minority
here actually having a *better* social background than the Finnish
majority (Finland used to be part of Sweden, back then only the
peasants spoke Finnish, and even today Swedish is "a language of the
upper class" here).

-- 
Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei