#GempakSpot: Guess Which Country Has The Smartest Students In The World

But for one country, their students are the brightest of all.

Spoiler alert: they are not from Malaysia.

Above average

According to a report in Bloomberg, students from China came out tops, beating their peers from all over the world in a survey evaluating their abilities in reading, maths and science.

Results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA) survey revealed that students in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang outperformed their peers in the science and mathematics subjects.

In fact, in reading, the 10 per cent of the most disadvantaged Chinese students tested had better skills than the OECD average. PISA assesses 600,000 students aged 15 in 79 countries to determine whether they have acquired the knowledge and skills “essential for full participation in modern societies", PISA said in a statement.

OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria told the news portal that the survey shows how difficult it is to improve education, despite various resources injected into it.

Gurria said this is especially true for OECD countries that have increased spending on primary and secondary students by more than 15 per cent in the past decade.

"It is disappointing that most OECD countries saw virtually no improvement in the performance of their students since PISA was first conducted in 2000,” Gurria was quoted as saying.

The report also said there are inequality in educational achievement depending on socio-economic background.

On average, 12 per cent of the variation in student reading performance within each country was associated with socio-economic status.

Well, guess we have a long way to go before we have a balanced education all around the world.