December 4, 2013

Swedes accuse PISA of fabricated data

Via Staffan's Personality Blog, here's an article from a Swedish (ahem, sore loser, ahem) newspaper accusing PISA of using fabricated data from Slovenia, Italy, and the United Arab Emirates. The charges don't involve students, but high school principals. The principals were supposed to fill in a 184 question survey for the Nosey Parkers at PISA, but there is evidence that dozens of principals just cut and pasted somebody else's answers, which wouldn't be hugely surprising with a survey that is 184 questions long.

A general problem with comparing results of countries in international tests are differing levels of motivation. It's remarkable how plausible the PISA results are in general considering how much this factor is likely to vary from place to place and time to time.

6 comments:

blogger said...

And yet Swedes are open to more immigration from such nations.

Anonymous said...

Are they saying Asians run PISA?

Anonymous said...

http://samfreedman1.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/10-things-you-should-know-about-pisa.html

Steve Sailerish comments from former UK education adviser, not the IQ commenting one I sent you. Realists seemed to have infiltrated the Dept. of Education here. No wonder the left hate Gove so much.

Anonymous said...

I feel great schadenfreude from Sweden's agony. Sweden is the most culturally Marxist country on the planet. It has decided to have a open door policy for the world's refugees. (Sweden is the only country giving permanent residency to any and all Syrians who apply.) It turns out that absorbing masses from the Third World is inconsistent with being world-beaters in education. Who knew?

interesting PISA observation for once said...

In Arabic they don't have the hard "P" sound so a lot of those words get transmuted to an "F" instead, e.g. Parsi/Farsi, or "the better part of valor." This also means that if one tried to relay some headlines/bloggorhea about PISA to any of his fellows it would sound more like FISA -- thus instituting a fanic.

Anonymous said...

A lot of the MSM in Sweden are blaming the governments private school reform, which probably has something to do with the results.

Some feminists blame Swedish men - the root of all evil - for not reading and thus setting an example for young boys. (So now they need male role models?)

But no one mentions the elephant in the room: immigration. The second your feet touch Swedish soil your IQ of 85 is no longer an obstacle for scholastic achievements. And there are unicorns in our woods...