ZT
It was the first time that mainland China has participated in the annual International Student Assessment (PISA), a survey of almost half-a-million schoolchildren in more than 70 countries by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
More than 5,000 15-year-old students in Shanghai sat the two-hour PISA exam and surprised experts with their stellar academic performance, in another sign of China's rapid modernisation.
The OECD said the result was a "wake-up call" for the rest of the world. The Shanghai students were in a class of their own in maths, hugely outperforming second-placed Singapore. The Chinese students also beat Finland by a wide margin to top spot in science and Korea to claim first place for reading.
More than one-quarter of Shanghai's students demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just three per cent.
While the results in Shanghai, arguably China's most advanced city, do not reflect the situation in the country as a whole, the OECD said China was "consistently scrutinising and constantly seeking to improve" its education system.
In particular, it praised China's decision to close down its version of grammar schools and develop "a more inclusive system in which all students are expected to perform at high levels". It also said China had "greatly" raised teacher's salaries and reduced "the emphasis on rote learning" in favour of boosting "the ability to apply knowledge to solving new problems and the ability to think creatively".
However, the OECD noted that China has long been organised around competitive exams, with schools working their students long hours every day and into the weekend.
Students are accustomed to "intense examinations and tests" and therefore may have been better suited to the PISA test. In addition, it estimated that eight out of ten Shanghainese schoolchildren get additional, out-of-hours, private tuition.
Meanwhile, Chinese students tend to spend less time on sport and other activities which are not core components of the "gaokao", a set of exams that determines their place at university, and indeed in life.
The pressure of the gaokao has been blamed for a lack of creativity in China by some critics. Xu Jilin, a professor of history at East China Normal University, whose son is at a Shanghai middle school, wrote in October that "this rigid examination system has created an exam-oriented education from the kindergarten, a destruction of talent and waste of youth."
He added that he felt that 80 per cent of his son's studies had not helped him learn something new, but had prepared him for tests. "Doing exercises every day is like practising gymnastics, repeating the same moves every day, dozens or hundreds of times in order to make sure that absolutely no errors are made during the exam."
The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international third-party, working with Chinese authorities, the OECD said.
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