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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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 Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 2:58 pm Post subject: Korea an education leader! Oh, wait a minute... |
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7126562.stm
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Finland stays top of global class
South Korean academic results are flying high
Finland and South Korea remain among the superpowers of education, according to a major international study.
The three-yearly Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) shows that the two countries are in the top five for reading and maths.
South Korea has made rapid progress since 2000, says the report - with its pupils improving by the equivalent of a whole school year.
The rankings are based on tests taken by 15-year-olds in 57 countries.
Finland, a consistent top performer in international education surveys, also came top of the science league table, published last week.
The survey, gathered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), also highlights the improvements in Poland.
READING TOP 10
S. Korea
Finland
Hong Kong
Canada
New Zealand
Ireland
Australia
Liechtenstein
Poland
Sweden
Source: Pisa/OECD
The rankings for reading, based on tests taken in 2006, show that Poland is ninth placed, among a group of leading countries identified as significantly above average.
The latest findings also show the extent of global competition in education - with the northern European countries now challenged by and overtaken by Asian rivals, including Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.
South Korea has continued to strengthen its position - after a remarkable rise in achievement against international competitors.
In the 1960s, the OECD says South Korea's national wealth was similar to Afghanistan's.
MATHS TOP 10
Taiwan
Finland
Hong Kong
S.Korea
Netherlands
Switzerland
Canada
Macao-China
Liechtenstein
Japan
Source: Pisa/OECD
But a sustained drive in education has seen it rise to the upper ranks in international education leagues - both in subject scores and in completion rates in secondary school.
As with Finland, there has been an emphasis in South Korea on education as a key to economic success and the "knowledge economy".
The OECD also highlights improvements in maths scores from teenagers in Mexico and Greece.
The UK has shown a downward turn in its standing - leaving the top 10 for both maths and reading despite an increase in spending on education.
It has joined other major European countries such as Germany and France in a group with "average" standards for maths and reading.
And the report says that overall the industrialised OECD countries have not seen improvements to match extra investment.
It says that between 1995 and 2004, OECD countries increased education spending by 39% on average, but that in response "learning outcomes have generally remained flat".
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The "Programme for International Student Assessment" seems legit enough but the bit highlighted in green was less inspiring.*
Also, the brilliant Korean alphabet does influence the reading score, and may be more of a factor than the education system itself.
I'm feeling particularly skeptical right now after going through a set of final exams with students who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.
*Good work everyone! Keep artificially inflating those marks and passing students to please their parents! Social Promotion Sparking! |
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Gwangjuboy
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Location: England
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 3:12 pm Post subject: Re: Korea an education leader! Oh, wait a minute... |
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| kermo wrote: |
| Also, the brilliant Korean alphabet does influence the reading score, and may be more of a factor than the education system itself. |
I would agree, particuarly considering the fact that Taiwan scores highly in math but doesn't make the top ten in reading. There aren't many students I know of who can't read Korean; even in the first grade. The ingenuity of the alphabet means that it is easy to read. I wonder whether large scale immigration in the US and the UK is having a negative impact on thir respective scores. Purely speculation of course. |
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markhan
Joined: 02 Aug 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 3:29 pm Post subject: Re: Korea an education leader! Oh, wait a minute... |
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| Gwangjuboy wrote: |
| kermo wrote: |
| Also, the brilliant Korean alphabet does influence the reading score, and may be more of a factor than the education system itself. |
I would agree, particuarly considering the fact that Taiwan scores highly in math but doesn't make the top ten in reading. There aren't many students I know of who can't read Korean; even in the first grade. The ingenuity of the alphabet means that it is easy to read. I wonder whether large scale immigration in the US and the UK is having a negative impact on thir respective scores. Purely speculation of course. |
I have never taken the best, so I can't really say with certainty.
But based on your guys' logic, since I can read Hangul, Hiragana(Japanese) and English 100%, I should be good at those languages too.
I am 100% sure, event though I did not take the test, that reading test involved far more than merely "reading." |
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ajgeddes
Joined: 28 Apr 2004
Location: Yongsan
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 3:34 pm Post subject: Re: Korea an education leader! Oh, wait a minute... |
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| markhan wrote: |
| Gwangjuboy wrote: |
| kermo wrote: |
| Also, the brilliant Korean alphabet does influence the reading score, and may be more of a factor than the education system itself. |
I would agree, particuarly considering the fact that Taiwan scores highly in math but doesn't make the top ten in reading. There aren't many students I know of who can't read Korean; even in the first grade. The ingenuity of the alphabet means that it is easy to read. I wonder whether large scale immigration in the US and the UK is having a negative impact on thir respective scores. Purely speculation of course. |
I have never taken the best, so I can't really say with certainty.
But based on your guys' logic, since I can read Hangul, Hiragana(Japanese) and English 100%, I should be good at those languages too.
I am 100% sure, event though I did not take the test, that reading test involved far more than merely "reading." |
That's a good point. But with languages like Korean, or English, even if you don't know the word, you can sound it out and maybe be able to make some sense of it. |
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Optimus Prime
Joined: 05 Jul 2007
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 3:39 pm Post subject: |
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| The rankings for reading, based on tests taken in 2006, |
I'd like to know what tests they took. Probably one of those where all the mass cheating was taking place. |
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jvalmer
Joined: 06 Jun 2003
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 3:47 pm Post subject: |
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Reading isn't about knowing the words, it's also about comprehension. Don't you guys remember the english test we took in school. We read some long @ss story and then we had to either write down or choose from a set of answers the right answer. I hated those tests.
example:
cat is to dog
as
tomato is to _______ |
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excitinghead
Joined: 18 Jul 2005
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Yu_Bum_suk
Joined: 25 Dec 2004
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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| in completion rates in secondary school |
You complete secondary school merely by being present, even if you score 0% on multiple choice exams. You get beaten if you're not present. How difficult could it be to acheive the highest rates of secondary school 'completion' in such a system? |
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lastat06513
Joined: 18 Mar 2003
Location: Sensus amo Caesar , etiamnunc victus amo uni plebian
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 4:10 pm Post subject: |
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Actually, if I were to get married (again*), I would want my child to study math and science in asia before going to college in the US, to me that makes alot of sense because schools stress alot of math and science (he/she/they could learn English naturally at home) and they can go to a local college/university in the US (which is far better in quality than any top Korean university).
In the US, the student wobbles their way all the way to college, where they buckle down and study.
In Korea, the student buckles down and studies alot all the way through high school and begins to slack off in university.
So much for the "no child left behind" policy~~ |
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faster
Joined: 03 Sep 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 4:31 pm Post subject: |
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Korea seems to be making the news in the "elite" education areas, too:
Summary: A Wall Street Journal study finds that certain high schools have a remarkable record of sending their students to elite U.S. colleges.
URL: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119638146482608732-9E67f3pXH1oZVdeiEGwshfa9_rM_20071229.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top
FULL TEXT:
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How to Get Into Harvard
A WSJ study finds that certain high schools have a remarkable record of sending their students to elite colleges.
By ELLEN GAMERMAN
November 30, 2007; Page W1
As college-application season enters its most stressful final stretch, parents want to know if their children's schools are delivering the goods -- consistently getting students into top universities.
It's a tricky question to answer, but for a snapshot, The Wall Street Journal examined this year's freshman classes at eight highly selective colleges to find out where they went to high school. New York City private schools and New England prep schools continue to hold sway -- Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., is a virtual factory, sending 19 kids to Harvard this fall -- but these institutions are seeing some new competition from schools overseas and public schools that focus on math and science.
� Chart: How the high schools stack up
� Parents' Perspectives: Does time, money and pressure pay off?
� College Essays: Writing tips from admissions experts
� Vote: How important is college to success?
The 10 schools that performed best in our survey are all private schools. Two top performers overall are located in South Korea. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul sent 14% of its graduating class to the eight colleges we examined -- that's more than four times the acceptance rate of the prestigious Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y.
No ranking of high schools is perfect, and this one offers a cross-section, rather than an exhaustive appraisal, of college admissions. For our survey, we chose eight colleges with an average admissions selectivity of 18% and whose accepted applicants had reading and math SAT scores in the 1350-1450 range, according to the College Board: Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Some colleges that would otherwise have met our criteria were excluded from our study because information on their students' high-school alma maters was unavailable. All the colleges in our survey received a record number of applications last year.
We tracked down the high-school alma maters of these colleges' current freshmen -- nearly 7,000 kids in all -- and made a list of the high schools that had graduating classes of at least 50 students. We then calculated what percentage of last year's graduating class at each high school had gone on to the colleges in our survey.
Despite the fact that many people who went to state schools or obscure liberal arts colleges lead happy, successful lives, high-school seniors and their parents are routinely terrorized with alarming and now familiar college-admissions statistics. There are more high-school seniors going on to college in America now than at any point in U.S. history. Last year, Harvard admitted an all-time low of 9% of applicants after receiving a record 23,000 applications.
In a sign of the shifting global economic food chain, students from abroad now take up a growing number of spots. At the University of Pennsylvania, 13% of the class of 2011 is made up of international students, up from 11.8% the previous year.
And coming from a prestigious suburban public school or elite private school may not offer the same advantages it once did for students. Many Ivy League schools say they're going after low-income students more aggressively, making it harder for middle-class kids to stand out.
"It's scary," says Jessica Assaf, 17 years old, who's waiting for word on her early application to Brown University. Ms. Assaf, whose parents send her to the $29,800-a-year Branson School north of San Francisco, is highlighting her work with an organization that focuses on the health hazards of cosmetics. But she worries her activism won't be enough to get her in, especially given Brown's record-low acceptance rate of about 13.5% last year. "A 14% acceptance rate isn't a good statistic," she says. "If someone said you had a 14% chance of living, that's nowhere near being reassured."
WHO'S GETTING IN
Among public schools, those that specialize in math and science fared well in our survey, in part because some top universities are focusing more on drawing high-caliber science and engineering students. Last year, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Alexandria, Va., sent 9% of its graduates to the colleges on our list -- with 14 students, or 3% of its graduates, going to Princeton.
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, another public school for kids who excel in science and engineering, last year sent graduates to Harvard, MIT, Duke and Cornell, and 14 went to nearby Johns Hopkins. Kids see that list of colleges every time they walk by the guidance office: It's written on a 10-foot board to give students inspiration, the school's director says.
Good neighbors make good feeder schools. Princeton High School, a public school down the street from Princeton University, sent 19 kids to the college last year, up from 12 four years ago. Jeff Lowe, the high school's college adviser, says the numbers are so high in part because the children of Princeton professors are more likely to attend the high school, and they're also likely to be good students. He says the school typically sends between 10 and 20 kids to the university every year. (The university subsidizes up to half the tuition for the child of a faculty member.) Two years ago, the high school began accepting kids from outside the district for $15,817, after parents requested it.
THE POWER OF THE COUNSELOR
Still, many parents enroll their kids in private schools for the trump card that top prep schools have long held: the powerful, highly connected college counselor. The college counselors at many private schools have spent years building relationships with college admissions offices. Some have inside experience in the admissions process.
Jon Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, is a former senior associate admissions director at Stanford University. Mr. Reider says his former colleagues are no longer working at the university -- he left seven years ago -- but he still thinks having worked in an admissions office gives him an edge. "Because I've been on the other side of the desk, I have some idea how an application reads and what goes through an admissions officer's mind when they read it," he says. Last year, he says, Stanford admitted 11 of his students -- more than any year since he took the high-school job.
Nancy Siegel, head counselor at Millburn High School in northern New Jersey, says that when an applicant vows that he or she will attend a particular college if accepted, she'll often let the school know. That can help a student's chances -- but if the child has a change of heart, she says, the high school is in trouble. "You talk to kids ahead of time and say, 'Don't you dare say that unless you mean it because the high school's reputation goes down the tubes,"' she says.
Samantha Broussard-Wilson promised to attend Georgetown if the school accepted her early application. It did. But later that spring, the student from Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, Calif., got into Yale. When she decided to go to New Haven, she says some teachers at her high school turned hostile. "I actually did get a lot of negative comments," says Ms. Broussard-Wilson, 18, now a freshman at Yale. "Teachers told me, 'You may have taken one of the spots from someone else at our school.'"
Richard Bischoff, director of admissions at the California Institute of Technology, says parents overestimate the importance of a high-school name. He recently received a letter from a parent of a toddler wanting to know where the child needs to go in order to get accepted at Caltech. Mr. Bischoff wouldn't indulge the question. "I don't have the formula," he says. |
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TexasPete
Joined: 24 May 2006
Location: Koreatown
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 4:40 pm Post subject: |
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| jvalmer wrote: |
Reading isn't about knowing the words, it's also about comprehension. Don't you guys remember the english test we took in school. We read some long @ss story and then we had to either write down or choose from a set of answers the right answer. I hated those tests.
example:
cat is to dog
as
tomato is to _______ |
Someone should tell my college students that reading is about comprehension because they can't comprehend crap. |
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Troll_Bait
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: [T]eaching experience doesn't matter much. -Lee Young-chan (pictured)
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 4:57 pm Post subject: Re: Korea an education leader! Oh, wait a minute... |
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| kermo wrote: |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7126562.stm
| Quote: |
Finland stays top of global class
South Korean academic results are flying high
Finland and South Korea remain among the superpowers of education, according to a major international study.
The three-yearly Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) shows that the two countries are in the top five for reading and maths.
South Korea has made rapid progress since 2000, says the report - with its pupils improving by the equivalent of a whole school year.
The rankings are based on tests taken by 15-year-olds in 57 countries.
Finland, a consistent top performer in international education surveys, also came top of the science league table, published last week.
The survey, gathered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), also highlights the improvements in Poland.
READING TOP 10
S. Korea
Finland
Hong Kong
Canada
New Zealand
Ireland
Australia
Liechtenstein
Poland
Sweden
Source: Pisa/OECD
The rankings for reading, based on tests taken in 2006, show that Poland is ninth placed, among a group of leading countries identified as significantly above average.
The latest findings also show the extent of global competition in education - with the northern European countries now challenged by and overtaken by Asian rivals, including Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.
South Korea has continued to strengthen its position - after a remarkable rise in achievement against international competitors.
In the 1960s, the OECD says South Korea's national wealth was similar to Afghanistan's.
MATHS TOP 10
Taiwan
Finland
Hong Kong
S.Korea
Netherlands
Switzerland
Canada
Macao-China
Liechtenstein
Japan
Source: Pisa/OECD
But a sustained drive in education has seen it rise to the upper ranks in international education leagues - both in subject scores and in completion rates in secondary school.
As with Finland, there has been an emphasis in South Korea on education as a key to economic success and the "knowledge economy".
The OECD also highlights improvements in maths scores from teenagers in Mexico and Greece.
The UK has shown a downward turn in its standing - leaving the top 10 for both maths and reading despite an increase in spending on education.
It has joined other major European countries such as Germany and France in a group with "average" standards for maths and reading.
And the report says that overall the industrialised OECD countries have not seen improvements to match extra investment.
It says that between 1995 and 2004, OECD countries increased education spending by 39% on average, but that in response "learning outcomes have generally remained flat".
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The "Programme for International Student Assessment" seems legit enough but the bit highlighted in green was less inspiring.*
Also, the brilliant Korean alphabet does influence the reading score, and may be more of a factor than the education system itself.
I'm feeling particularly skeptical right now after going through a set of final exams with students who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.
*Good work everyone! Keep artificially inflating those marks and passing students to please their parents! Social Promotion Sparking! |
So what happens after the age of fifteen? What are the students like by the time they're college freshmen? Kermo and I know. |
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Mr. Pink
Joined: 21 Oct 2003
Location: China
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 5:06 pm Post subject: |
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Any other Canadians surprised to see Canada in that list for math...surprised the hell out of me.
Curious if America is included in that test...seems weird they couldn't be up there for literacy. |
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ED209
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 5:14 pm Post subject: Re: Korea an education leader! Oh, wait a minute... |
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| Gwangjuboy wrote: |
| I wonder whether large scale immigration in the US and the UK is having a negative impact on thir respective scores. Purely speculation of course. |
Yes it is. Immigrants still only make a small percentage of the UK student population. Those other countries also take in immigrants let's not forget. Also in my personal experience Schools with a high number of second generation immigrants out perform other schools(read Asian students study more than I did). No reasons have been given to why the UK has fallen(other than blaming the DOE and government), I would be interested to find out if immigration is factor. Maybe the US and UK just have better television. |
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bjonothan
Joined: 29 Apr 2003
Location: All over the place
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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Koreans have always told me that they are pretty kick ass at maths. So, they are nice at maths and yet another subject they study they are probably the worst at. I mean, think about it, they study a language for 6 - 10 years and they still can't speak it.
And they are good at science? I reckon about 90 something percent believe that a fan can kill you. Wouldn't that come down to basic science? I would have to say that if they all believe that, it would tell you something about their science abilities right away.
All that aside, they are probably the biggest cheats on tests in the world.
They probably cheated on the PISA as well.  |
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