Top US students lag far behind top students around the world in 2012 PISA test results

Top U.S. students, those that are among the top 10 percent of the population, lag far behind the top students in the highest achieving countries, a gap that is far bigger than the gap between the bottom students in the United States and elsewhere. That’s if you measure it by the results of the 2012 PISA test, given to 15 year olds across the world.

I wanted to dig deeper into the 2012 PISA test results, released Dec. 3, 2013, to see not just how the average American 15-year-old performs, but how both extremes are faring. First, I isolated the top 10 percent of students (aka 90th percentile) in each of the 65 countries or subregions tested by the OECD and ranked their math scores. The top 10 percent here earned a score of 600, on average, putting the US in 34th place. That’s about the same ranking as the average US student, whose score of 481 places 36th among nations. But the score gaps at the top are bigger than I expected. Top US students are more than a 100 points below the top students in Shanghai Singapore and Taipei. That’s the equivalent of several years of schooling. By contrast, the bottom 10 percent of US students lag the bottom students of the top achieving regions by much less than 100 points (except for in Shanghai, where the bottom 10 percent of students approach the score of the average American 15 year old!)

I’d also like to emphasize that scores of the top 10 percent in the United States have been declining over the past decade. See this post.

Here follow charts for the top 10 percent, the bottom 10 percent. I took spreadsheets from the PISA report annex, filtered for 90th and 10th percentile scores, ranked them and deleted everything else. For reference, here’s a link to the global rankings, that list the average scores for each nation. See Table 1A, page 19.

2012 PISA Math Scores for the Top 10 Percent (90th Percentile)

2012 PISA Math Scores for the Bottom 10 Percent (10th Percentile)

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