China’s academic obsession with testing
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
It's the same reason why Americans are really good at basketball and football, why Brazilians are really good at soccer. Kids will go through great lengths to earn respect from peers.
Whether the attitude toward academic achievements creates followers or leaders, remains to be proven.
What percentage of kids who try really hard to be really good at basketball or football make a successful career out of it? I don't know but I suspect about the same ratio as those that try really hard to be rock-stars.
On the contrary, it seems to be quite stable continuation of a centuries-old tradition[1], which has been quite successful, but optimized for different outcomes (success at tasks for which the rules are clear and fixed).
Test is not just about testing skills. The most important part is understanding and mastery of the subject. PISA (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/) test is designed to examine students high level understanding and application of subject knowledge and skills. The fact of Chinese students did well in PISA test cannot be just attributed to "obsession with testing". You have to understand the subject to do well in the test.
Some people like to say Chinese /Asian students are only good at rote memorization. But, you know what, PISA is not designed to test rote memorization. You can try some PISA questions by yourself at http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/ to see how rote memorization can help you in the PISA exam.
PISA tests are time-bound; thus, they cannot avoid testing time management. PISA tests include multiple choice questions; thus, they cannot avoid testing students' ability to eliminate nonsensical options. The issues with short-answer questions are more subtle and less problematic, but at the very least, depend on the reviewer having the capacity to fully understand the students' response, linguistically and colloquially.
These are very common complaints about test design: that the test scores end up being trumped by orthogonal "test-taking" skills. The typical responses to them are that these orthogonal skills are nevertheless useful "real-world" skills, which is absolutely true, but it undermines the original claim that the tests are primarily examining the actual subject knowledge.
An obsession with testing would most certainly explain a statistical bump, but I imagine neither you nor I can accurately attribute how much each of those things contributes to the PISA score of each country.
Now if i really wanted to be culturally insensitive, i'd add in a portion for preponderance to cheat to show themselves in a good light. But good luck ever getting governments together to try to accurately measure that...