2024-04-02 15:18:11
Expert Rashad Aliyev
The results of the PISA-2022 International Student Assessment have been announced, and you have probably already seen in a number of posts that there is a significant decline in our country’s indicators – in reading and understanding our mother tongue, we have dropped from the previous 389 points to 365 points (-24), in Mathematics, we have dropped from 420 points to 397 points (-23). in natural sciences, we dropped from 398 points to 380 points (-18). But let me give you a prediction – in a few days, Mr. Amrullayev or his deputies will hold a press conference and say that hey people, don’t do too much, the decline did not happen only in our country, the reason was that Covid disrupted the educational process 🙂
But almost none of the PISA posts I have come across today have touched on what I consider to be the most important point. I wrote about this important nuance last year when our students participated in the PISA exams.
Consider the ranking of countries.
Only country names are listed in the list. The city names are listed only for China, and one is listed for us – ONLY THE CITY OF BAKU. That is, everyone participated as a country, and we as the city of Baku. Why do you think?
PISA is one of the most prestigious studies in the world and is widely used to measure and compare the educational level of countries. Our country participated in this assessment in 2006 and 2009, but because the results were very weak, it was decided to withdraw from the program immediately to avoid embarrassment.
In 2018, it was decided to participate in PISA again. But this time, ours used bias, probably to artificially “inflate” the results. After all, you know, the main problem of ours is to get ahead of some “…stan” in the list, so that every evening they read you development stories from AzTV 🙂 They found a solution for it as I will describe below.
In such international assessments, as a rule, in order for the exam results to be representative (that is, to reflect the situation of the entire country), the schools (and students) that will participate in that exam should be selected from among all students in all schools of the country. In other words, in order for the student group to be selected to represent the whole country as honestly as possible, both city, district, lowland and remote village schools should be represented here. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, the participants to be selected should be randomly selected so that the results of the study are statistically accurate and reliable.
But starting from 2018, the modern, young and English-speaking personnel of the Ministry of Education decided to select the students not from the whole country, but only from the city of Baku. That is, although there are about 4,000 schools in the country, our young leaders began to select the contingent of students who will participate in this study only from among the 300 schools of Baku – that is, the capital city where the best schools of the country are concentrated. In short, a country with 4,000+ schools was represented in that exam only by 8,000 students from 180 schools selected from 300 schools in Baku.
When the students who will participate in the exam are selected from Baku, where the best schools of the country are concentrated, of course, all average, weak and extremely weak regional and remote rural schools are automatically left out, none of them participates in the exam. So your results are artificially inflated. (You can be sure that even when choosing within Baku itself, the percentage of “weak” among Baku schools was additionally “fingered” to the list in order to prevent them from being included in the list.)
I think that thanks to this knowledge, the results of our country in 2018 could be slightly higher than the results of Kazakhstan (although in 2009 we were far behind them). This time it is impossible to say even that, because despite almost all expectations, this time we are also behind Kazakhstan and Georgia.
In general, as can be seen from the list, even with all these skills, we have not been able to go very far, because while the other post-Soviet countries on the list (the Baltics, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) are ranked higher than or close to the average of OECD countries (even Estonia is the FIRST among European countries in place), we are about 100 points behind the OECD average for all indicators, which means that our students are on average about 1.5-2 years of education behind their peers from other countries in terms of the skills and abilities measured by this exam 😞
Imagine what the situation would be like if this knowledge was not used. I am sure that if this skill had not been used, we would have taken one of the last places on the list. In other words, as you already understood, one of our main goals in choosing the students who will participate in the exam not from all the schools of the country, but only from the capital city where the best schools are located, was to artificially exaggerate the results and deceive the society.
By the way, apart from us, only China does it – it participates with 3-4 provinces. China is perhaps understandable – it is not a small country like ours, but it has logistical difficulties. In any case, China ranked first in the 2018 PISA assessment precisely because it was represented by four developed provinces. In other words, if you look at the ranking, China is ahead of the most advanced countries such as Singapore, Finland, Japan and Korea in terms of education level 🙂 But at the expense of what? Because students from only 4 provinces participated in this exam from China (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang). You can’t agree that in such a case it would be a very wrong and baseless idea to say that “China is ahead of Singapore in the field of education”.
At the same time, it would be wrong and unfounded to say about our country, based on this list, “We are ahead of such and such a country in the field of education”, because it is NOT correct to compare our indicators with the results of other countries, because, unlike other countries, our indicators are only Baku’s and probably Baku’s. are indicators of the best schools within.
But all this is not surprising. The current team selected a group of talented students in mathematics, physics or chemistry, intensively prepared them for the international Olympiads and won medals at the Olympiads in a short period of time. Success in the Olympics is certainly good in itself. But this has a marginal connection with the reforms in the education system as a whole or with the development of the education system.