IQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation. By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'. You'd expect this to manifest in reduced test scores and reduced quality of outcomes across a breadth of fields over time paired with the inverse happening in countries seeing gains. And that does not seem inaccurate.
Why this is, is an interesting question but it hits on too many taboo topics. Though perhaps rational discussion becoming taboo is itself a part of the reason. When you accept reality, whatever it gives you, you're obviously going to have a far more rational population and better outcomes than one that insists on bending reality to fit a desired narrative, even when it obviously does not. After all this is precisely what brought Greater Arabia from the center of education and learning in the world to rather the opposite. It wasn't religion, but letting ideology dominate reality instead of the other way around.
> IQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation.
I wonder to what extent demographic shifts account for the observed reversal? It would be interesting to tease out what happens where composition remains constant, i.e. Poland. Though I doubt this explains the entire effect.
> By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'.
seems like the Flynn effect doing its thing just as it did in western countries in the 20th century.
I get the feeling you want to blame "woke" ideologies for this decline. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
In my opinion we just have it too easy nowadays. Too much entertainment, screens and not enough challenges to keep kids thinking they need to be as sharp as they can be.
The "Fox News" right is just as guilty of letting ideology override reason as the "woke" left. As are many other groups (most of Western politics is a bit more complicated than the US's left/right split)
Framing this as a pattern across the entire industrial world is a bit misleading. Looking through the data at Math Scores since 2015 shows big country level split:
Japan: -3
S Korea: -1
Singapore: +1
Taiwan: +9
---
Germany: -45
France: -38
Sweden: -33
US: -10
This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently than their East Asian counterparts and stop pursing those actions as national policy
Those top scorer countries just soooooo happen to have world lowest birthrate. Maybe it has to do with extraordinary pressure to succeed at all cost since one is baby?
I don't think so. While I believe more in the student than the school for success, in the formative years, a good foundation is necessary, as somebody can't know better if they don't know anything.
So, a good education system's effects are compounded for younger children w.r.t. higher education.
So, these education systems need a check and tune-up to adapt them to current age and perform at their peak again.
Living in one Asian country, phone scrolling still happens with adults but kids get a lot of homework and definitely do it. Honestly excessive amounts, quantity over quality but at least studying is happening.
If some third type of country didn't do doomscrolling but ignored their homework to play outside, that's better than scrolling but it's still not homework.
I thought the reason that China and Singapore were so far ahead of everyone else was that they were urban populations vs everyone else include rural areas.
I assumed that Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang were purely urban, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm very curious about this as well, because BSJZ is almost an entire proficiency level above (almost) everyone else. That's an insane gap.
> news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media
FTFA: “Digital distraction also affects the wider classroom. More than one in four students said that classmates were distracted by digital devices in most or every science lesson. Students surrounded by distracted classmates performed less well, were less engaged in learning and felt less connected to their school.
Students who say they did not use AI to draft text for writing assignments outperformed those who say they did. Among frequent users, however, students who used AI to help them learn and were taught how to assess the quality of AI-generated information tended to perform better than those who received no such guidance.”
Sure you can torture your children with ever harsher "education", almost none of which matters in non-research positions. Then don't be surprised when they run out.
> you can torture your children with ever harsher "education"
Harsh educations don’t work. Neither does modern coddling, prevalent in the West. If any adversity prompts a mental health crisis, you’re at a global disadvantage. Economically and, I’d argue, in terms of quality of life.
The issue is that Mental Health is genuinely a fleeting, seemingly slowly renewable resource brought down by either screens, stress, or something else. I believe that openly talking about it, while a great way to de-stigmatize it, may have inadvertently caused self-diagnoses and worsening symptoms to increase.
There is also something else to be said about Mental Health, coming from one of the countries with the lowest rates of someone taking their own lives, and its not just due to underreporting.
Peru probably isn't the best place to live, but the food, weather, people, and general culture which almost normalizes suffering in an almost Buddhist way (Sufre Peruano sufre! lit. Suffer Peruvian, Suffer!) might have something to do with a more robust mental health situation?
PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI.
So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.
Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep screens and AI solutions out of classrooms. That's not solving everything but at least students would be given a few hours window of de-brainroting everyday.
I'm open to accept that AI can have a positive impact on education but people and tools are apparently not ready and for the moment using it is a net negative.
> So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.
The AI they’re talking about is not EdTech AI-based teaching tools. It’s students who use ChatGPT to handle work for them so they can ignore any teaching parts.
Apples and oranges. Using this study to draw conclusions about AI EdTech would be a mistake
As you say, like most of any of our current issues, it's not the act of doing something that is the issue, it's the lack of remuneration for doing that thing. Any region would gain an immense amount of more "smart point metrics" (what I choose to refer these scores as) if students had their own personal tutors that helped them along. But that doesn't fit our "profit or perish" economic models.
> So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.
Kid pasting the question into ChatGPT and pasting its answer back is not the same as an AI teacher persona.
In my mind an AI teacher can be like a traditional education package (syllabus, material, questions, keeping track of progression) but way more flexible. I don't see no reason why AI teachers shouldn't give Bloom's 2 sigma effect to kids (and adults) very soon.
The "AI use ... To help me learn" graph is really interesting! It may be interpreted as showing moderate selective AI use being beneficial and, perhaps, even mitigating the effect of socioeconomic status, that is democratising the learning of science. However, it may also indicated that groups with low AI use/access are left behind, or at least that over-reliance on AI in learning is detrimental.
The breakdown for AI usage is four categories though, not three. While the first three are negatively correlated with increased usage, the one for using AI "to help me learn" is much more flat when it comes to usage frequency.
I believe it is probably a combination of several factors:
- Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media.
- App UX/UI: Many apps are designed to compete for our attention, which can gradually reduce our ability to sustain focus.
- LLMs: The impact of AI is more recent and still needs to be properly assessed. However, LLMs could significantly affect attention and critical thinking for both adults and children, especially as we increasingly delegate parts of our thinking to AI models.
- Changes in the education system: In France, for example, mathematics was removed as a mandatory subject for some high-school tracks for a period of time. In my view, that was a major mistake.
- COVID-19: Many students experienced significant gaps in their education during the pandemic, with the effects often being more pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Also, is a 1960’s test that hasn’t substantively changed a good metric? Maybe it is, I honestly don’t know, but I’d be curious to see the content before assuming it’s a useful benchmark.
Has what students are expected to know changed since the 60s? For instance, have there been any, I dunno, new developments in technology over the past 60-odd years?
Dropping, around or below OECD average:
Iceland, Israel, Malta, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Malaysia, Romania, Peru, Ukraine, North Macedonia
If you're referring to the few-point difference between 2012 and 2018 in the first chart here: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... I think that's more likely to be statistical noise. Keep in mind that PISA was originally normed to a mean of 500 and standard deviation 100. Even the more obvious drop after 2018 (I blame the pandemic) down to a mean of 466 on the reading test in 2025 isn't all that huge in absolute terms, though definitely statistically significant with the large sample they have.
A factor, certainly, but culture, including the culture around education, are arguably bigger factors (which social media is also a vector for modifying; medium is the message and all that).
Social and cultural expectations and conventions are extremely important. Even in supposedly laissez-faire Western countries where traditional cultural expectations have withered to the point of laxity, people still live their lives according to convention and expectation, even if those conventions and expectations are increasingly vulgar and dictated by powerful interest. (Indeed, the fertility crisis is determined largely by patterns of convention. It used to be that, for most people, it was expected that you would marry and have children earlier rather than later. Now, our cultural expectations actually penalize that kind of behavior. You're supposed to "find yourself", "play the field", or "build up your career" first.)
Human beings operate more by convention than by moral reasoning. Society needs an environment demands good things from them. Even when we know what the right or good course of action is through moral reasoning and discernment, it is very helpful for social convention and culture to support those choices.
The law is also traditionally a source of guardrails that help people attain better lives.
"English pupils have pulled ahead of the rest of the UK in international reading, maths and science tests, new data suggests, with Scotland and Wales falling further behind."
Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?
Anecdotal, but in Spain kids don't take these tests seriously.
I remember when we were in school we would ask if the tests counted towards the final note for the subject and they didn't so we would just basically finish asap so we could do other things.
And I think this wasn't a "just my class" kind of thing.
The U.S. is at 17.8% top performers, well behind Japan and Korea but around the same as Canada and Switzerland. But the U.S. is significantly ahead of the big EU countries: Germany is at 14%, France is at 9.8%, Italy is at 10.1% and Spain is at 7%.
Unfortunately, those scores are not reliable. It is a recurring problem with the USA for the PISA studies.
The preliminary chapter explains why data has lower confidence is some places. For the USA, there were many problems, including political reluctance in some states or schools, that lead to uncontrolled biases. Notably, the ratio of unreachable children is 40 %, twice more than their upper limit for valid results.
Parents used to offload parenting to streets, fields and forests for decades. I don't think the offloading is the cause. But switching the offloading provider to SOCIAL MEDIA (of which Youtube is one) might've been.
The modern trend is parents spending a lot more time and involvement with their kids then used to be the norm. The norm was that kid were outside unsupervised doing whatever. The expectation on parents went up rather then down.
Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn't really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force.
AI already writes most of the articles I see posted here, is doing math at the level of the best mathematicians, and is writing a ton of the code out there. Given another decade to develop, the kids will be hitting the workforce with very stiff competition. It's not a shock they're putting their energy elsewhere, and I can't say they're wrong.
They may be the first generation who grow up fully catered to by AI.
> is doing math at the level of the best mathematics
Terence Tao a few days ago [1]:
> When we point the AIs at really difficult problems where none of the standard techniques apply, they are still very, very bad, I mean they're just randomly guessing.
Please don't reply saying they'll be proving the Collatz conjecture next week. It adds nothing.
Aren't the best mathematicians the best at solving the hardest problems? I don't see how you can argue this without assuming an arbitrary scale for being "good" at something.
Let's see you solve some open problems before you dismiss LLM capabilities. They're working at a level far beyond all but the best of the best.
And we're only a couple of years in. Their capabilities aren't going to be getting worse over time. These kids will be hitting the workforce after AI has another decade of improvement put into it.
Sure, if these kids can all perform at Tao's level, they could likely be able to keep up with the AI capabilities from a decade before they would enter the workforce.
I was clear on what I was responding to, and quoted it: "is doing math at the level of the best mathematics". This is misinformation and a public perception that will harm maths as it continues to spread. For some actual insight on the relationship between human and LLM maths (including on why thinking of it in terms of "levels" is misguided), see the video I linked.
Your broader point is based on a future extrapolation of LLM capabilities that is far from guaranteed to play out, so it sounds like poor risk management to me, even accepting your framing of it purely in terms of value in the workforce (which I don't).
> Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn't really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force.
If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible.
I mean, what's the alternative? AI does everything for me and I play Fortnite all day? Might as well plug yourself into the Matrix.
The situation will probably be like with airline pilots. The plane is mostly an automated system, but we simply don't let automation to work through exceptional situations, without human review. Therefore, lots of pilot training (and their presence) is still required.
But it's also hard to guess what exactly skill should the pilots have. It's clear that lots of things from manual aircraft do not translate well to automated.
Children of the Magenta Line seems very topical, especially wrt AI
>In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren VanderBurgh gave a lecture warning about the dangers of autopilot. He titled it "children of the magenta line," after the magenta coloured course line the flight computer draws across a cockpit display. He noticed that pilots were so used to following that line, to managing the automation rather than actually flying the plane, that they lost their own skills to manually fly the plane. This wasn’t a problem until it was a problem.
>VanderBurgh’s concern was not about autopilot itself but rather the complete dependency on autopilot at the expense of the internal knowledge of how it works and the loss of the judgment to know when to use it. In 2009, his warning came true in the very worst way possible over the Atlantic. When Air France 447’s sensors iced over, the autopilot handed a perfectly good airliner back to its crew, the pilots, confused and out of practice, stalled it into the sea.
Just like kids eventually take over most of the daily tasks for their parents (for people in countries where you don't have any kind of retirement fund and assisted living, etc.). Same will happen here - on one hand because the human population keeps growing older without any replacement and on the other because all the new tech will be too complicated for humans to understand.
It seems unlikely that we'll be able to keep up with AI in any capacity. Your alternative seems like the inevitable outcome of AI succeeding, and it doesn't sound so bad.
Dunno man, the articles ai writes are empty cardboard crap, and the code it produces is hot garbage. “Cleaner upper of AI messes” might be a good future skill to have.
I don't think you can dismiss the output quality so easily.
Give yourself a few hours to write out some code in the old way. Can you really tell me that you could not have done a better job with AI in the same time?
Eg, implement chess or poker games.
Or write a component like a Swiss table.
It's not obvious to me that AI produces bad work at all.
That’s the thing - many times it’s not obvious. But go check that chunk of code that, sure, works, and you’ll find subtleties that just don’t look right. But hey - you do you if that’s the kind of quality you’re happy with.
I hope people recognize this account doom posts what amounts to misanthropic propaganda at a very high rate. There’s never any question how the comment is going to be framed.
It’s always, “give up little humans, your robot overlords are here.”
Yup, this is "inclusive education" effects, predicted long time ago by education experts. Kids with special needs (from handicapped to criminals) are thrown into regular schools and classes, making education totally inefficient. In Poland one of the best on the World system of special education is being demolished in the name of this absurdity. But this is what people voted for.
That's quite funny, but the new recruits at my work place are super smart and full of piss and vinegar. Much more motivated than some of the older workers. The problem is that they will work lots of unpaid overtime, and they have no idea about work boundaries and being exploited by employers.
The excess energy dissipates when you realise the commensurate rewards don't materialise, after a few years. But if you also have family wealth, it doesn't matter so much.
Depends on how well they translate that effort into promotions or company switches into better positions.
I averaged around 18mo to either a promotion or a move in my 20s, mostly off the back of working harder (to get the promotions/comp increases) and working smarter (to work out when they aren't coming and jumping somewhere else).
If this makes sense for someone has a lot more to do with their ambition/desire and ability to work the system than anything else. It also helps a ton if you are also legitimately very good at what you do. Then it's pretty easy because you are just demanding you are paid commensurate with impact.
Simply doing overtime and having hustle doesn't cut it though, you actually need to be able to leverage it into career progress or it's just wasted life.
Depending on the education/age of new recruits, you might not have seen much of the, younger, lower scored cohort, because the sharp performance drop only really started after 2018 (so the oldest affected people are around 22).
IQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation. By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'. You'd expect this to manifest in reduced test scores and reduced quality of outcomes across a breadth of fields over time paired with the inverse happening in countries seeing gains. And that does not seem inaccurate.
Why this is, is an interesting question but it hits on too many taboo topics. Though perhaps rational discussion becoming taboo is itself a part of the reason. When you accept reality, whatever it gives you, you're obviously going to have a far more rational population and better outcomes than one that insists on bending reality to fit a desired narrative, even when it obviously does not. After all this is precisely what brought Greater Arabia from the center of education and learning in the world to rather the opposite. It wasn't religion, but letting ideology dominate reality instead of the other way around.
[1] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
> IQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation.
I wonder to what extent demographic shifts account for the observed reversal? It would be interesting to tease out what happens where composition remains constant, i.e. Poland. Though I doubt this explains the entire effect.
> By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'.
seems like the Flynn effect doing its thing just as it did in western countries in the 20th century.
I get the feeling you want to blame "woke" ideologies for this decline. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
In my opinion we just have it too easy nowadays. Too much entertainment, screens and not enough challenges to keep kids thinking they need to be as sharp as they can be.
The "Fox News" right is just as guilty of letting ideology override reason as the "woke" left. As are many other groups (most of Western politics is a bit more complicated than the US's left/right split)
Framing this as a pattern across the entire industrial world is a bit misleading. Looking through the data at Math Scores since 2015 shows big country level split:
Japan: -3
S Korea: -1
Singapore: +1
Taiwan: +9
---
Germany: -45
France: -38
Sweden: -33
US: -10
This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently than their East Asian counterparts and stop pursing those actions as national policy
*edit for formatting
Those top scorer countries just soooooo happen to have world lowest birthrate. Maybe it has to do with extraordinary pressure to succeed at all cost since one is baby?
I don't think so. While I believe more in the student than the school for success, in the formative years, a good foundation is necessary, as somebody can't know better if they don't know anything.
So, a good education system's effects are compounded for younger children w.r.t. higher education.
So, these education systems need a check and tune-up to adapt them to current age and perform at their peak again.
maybe check out ``western`` birth rates without immigration before spouting next time
I see news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media.
Given the big gap between the east and the west... does anybody know if these are somehow less used/abused in asian countries?
Any other reason why this gap might happen?
Thanks
Living in one Asian country, phone scrolling still happens with adults but kids get a lot of homework and definitely do it. Honestly excessive amounts, quantity over quality but at least studying is happening.
If some third type of country didn't do doomscrolling but ignored their homework to play outside, that's better than scrolling but it's still not homework.
At what age does the homework kick in for kids growing up in Asia?
>Given the big gap between the east and the west
I thought the reason that China and Singapore were so far ahead of everyone else was that they were urban populations vs everyone else include rural areas.
I assumed that Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang were purely urban, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm very curious about this as well, because BSJZ is almost an entire proficiency level above (almost) everyone else. That's an insane gap.
> news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media
FTFA: “Digital distraction also affects the wider classroom. More than one in four students said that classmates were distracted by digital devices in most or every science lesson. Students surrounded by distracted classmates performed less well, were less engaged in learning and felt less connected to their school. Students who say they did not use AI to draft text for writing assignments outperformed those who say they did. Among frequent users, however, students who used AI to help them learn and were taught how to assess the quality of AI-generated information tended to perform better than those who received no such guidance.”
Here's a data point that should help:
Poland's math score dropped by just 5 points. As for other tests:
Science: -4
Reading: -7.
Much like with GDP per capita, my country is climbing the rankings, but only via walkover.
> but only via walkover.
what that means?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkover
In sports it's victory because the opponents didn't show up or were disqualified.
As they say, demographics is destiny.
Sure you can torture your children with ever harsher "education", almost none of which matters in non-research positions. Then don't be surprised when they run out.
> you can torture your children with ever harsher "education"
Harsh educations don’t work. Neither does modern coddling, prevalent in the West. If any adversity prompts a mental health crisis, you’re at a global disadvantage. Economically and, I’d argue, in terms of quality of life.
The issue is that Mental Health is genuinely a fleeting, seemingly slowly renewable resource brought down by either screens, stress, or something else. I believe that openly talking about it, while a great way to de-stigmatize it, may have inadvertently caused self-diagnoses and worsening symptoms to increase.
There is also something else to be said about Mental Health, coming from one of the countries with the lowest rates of someone taking their own lives, and its not just due to underreporting.
Peru probably isn't the best place to live, but the food, weather, people, and general culture which almost normalizes suffering in an almost Buddhist way (Sufre Peruano sufre! lit. Suffer Peruvian, Suffer!) might have something to do with a more robust mental health situation?
> Mental Health is genuinely a fleeting, seemingly slowly renewable resource
Is there a credible source for “mental health” being an extinguishable quantity? This sounds an awful lot like the battery hypothesis of longevity.
PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI.
See graphs on PISA 2025 homepage : https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...
So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers. Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep screens and AI solutions out of classrooms. That's not solving everything but at least students would be given a few hours window of de-brainroting everyday. I'm open to accept that AI can have a positive impact on education but people and tools are apparently not ready and for the moment using it is a net negative.
> So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.
The AI they’re talking about is not EdTech AI-based teaching tools. It’s students who use ChatGPT to handle work for them so they can ignore any teaching parts.
Apples and oranges. Using this study to draw conclusions about AI EdTech would be a mistake
Sloppy conclusion about edtech startups.
If everyone is hiring a "tutor" to just do their homework for them, that doesn't mean that all tutors are bad.
There’s many books and established schools of thought about computers being terrible for learning even before the latest wave AI edtech nonsense.
Simply put, there’s nothing better than old school pen to paper.
The biggest speedbump to that is teacher time. Grading and returning worksheets for students is a huge unpaid time sink for teachers.
As you say, like most of any of our current issues, it's not the act of doing something that is the issue, it's the lack of remuneration for doing that thing. Any region would gain an immense amount of more "smart point metrics" (what I choose to refer these scores as) if students had their own personal tutors that helped them along. But that doesn't fit our "profit or perish" economic models.
> So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.
Kid pasting the question into ChatGPT and pasting its answer back is not the same as an AI teacher persona.
In my mind an AI teacher can be like a traditional education package (syllabus, material, questions, keeping track of progression) but way more flexible. I don't see no reason why AI teachers shouldn't give Bloom's 2 sigma effect to kids (and adults) very soon.
The "AI use ... To help me learn" graph is really interesting! It may be interpreted as showing moderate selective AI use being beneficial and, perhaps, even mitigating the effect of socioeconomic status, that is democratising the learning of science. However, it may also indicated that groups with low AI use/access are left behind, or at least that over-reliance on AI in learning is detrimental.
The breakdown for AI usage is four categories though, not three. While the first three are negatively correlated with increased usage, the one for using AI "to help me learn" is much more flat when it comes to usage frequency.
This is alarming.
I believe it is probably a combination of several factors:
- Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media.
- App UX/UI: Many apps are designed to compete for our attention, which can gradually reduce our ability to sustain focus.
- LLMs: The impact of AI is more recent and still needs to be properly assessed. However, LLMs could significantly affect attention and critical thinking for both adults and children, especially as we increasingly delegate parts of our thinking to AI models.
- Changes in the education system: In France, for example, mathematics was removed as a mandatory subject for some high-school tracks for a period of time. In my view, that was a major mistake.
- COVID-19: Many students experienced significant gaps in their education during the pandemic, with the effects often being more pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
At Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg Sweden 80% of the students would pass the entrance exam in the 60s.
These days it's reversed, only 20% pass.
I was told this was the case around 2005 when I studied there.
The exam has not changed in difficulty.
What percentage of the population is expected to get university education today vs the sixties?
Also, is a 1960’s test that hasn’t substantively changed a good metric? Maybe it is, I honestly don’t know, but I’d be curious to see the content before assuming it’s a useful benchmark.
What's the difference in how many people apply?
> The exam has not changed in difficulty
Has what students are expected to know changed since the 60s? For instance, have there been any, I dunno, new developments in technology over the past 60-odd years?
> Has what students are expected to know changed since the 60s?
No, basic algebra and calculus has not changed.
> No, basic algebra and calculus has not changed.
That's all that's on the entrance exam? Basic algebra and calculus?
The drop is not uniform; see Table I.2.6 (2022 -> 2025). Focusing on math:
Stable, above OECD average: Taiwan, Macao, Korea, Estonia, United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, New Zealand
Stable, around or below OECD average: United States, Slovakia, Greece, Croatia, Qatar, Montenegro, Mongolia, Mexico, Brunei
Dropping, previously above OECD average: Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Latvia, Portugal, Norway, Spain, France, Hungary
Dropping, around or below OECD average: Iceland, Israel, Malta, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Malaysia, Romania, Peru, Ukraine, North Macedonia
Improving, all below OECD average: Türkiye, Thailand, UAE, Philippines, Jordan, Georgia, Cambodia
The decline seems to have started in the 2010s. Makes me wonder if this is connected to Jon Haidt's ideas about the impact of social media.
Last I heard it started in the 90s. Although a lot of horrifying graphs do have their inflection point the year the iPhone came out.
If you're referring to the few-point difference between 2012 and 2018 in the first chart here: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... I think that's more likely to be statistical noise. Keep in mind that PISA was originally normed to a mean of 500 and standard deviation 100. Even the more obvious drop after 2018 (I blame the pandemic) down to a mean of 466 on the reading test in 2025 isn't all that huge in absolute terms, though definitely statistically significant with the large sample they have.
A factor, certainly, but culture, including the culture around education, are arguably bigger factors (which social media is also a vector for modifying; medium is the message and all that).
Social and cultural expectations and conventions are extremely important. Even in supposedly laissez-faire Western countries where traditional cultural expectations have withered to the point of laxity, people still live their lives according to convention and expectation, even if those conventions and expectations are increasingly vulgar and dictated by powerful interest. (Indeed, the fertility crisis is determined largely by patterns of convention. It used to be that, for most people, it was expected that you would marry and have children earlier rather than later. Now, our cultural expectations actually penalize that kind of behavior. You're supposed to "find yourself", "play the field", or "build up your career" first.)
Human beings operate more by convention than by moral reasoning. Society needs an environment demands good things from them. Even when we know what the right or good course of action is through moral reasoning and discernment, it is very helpful for social convention and culture to support those choices.
The law is also traditionally a source of guardrails that help people attain better lives.
"English pupils have pulled ahead of the rest of the UK in international reading, maths and science tests, new data suggests, with Scotland and Wales falling further behind."
Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?
Anecdotal, but in Spain kids don't take these tests seriously. I remember when we were in school we would ask if the tests counted towards the final note for the subject and they didn't so we would just basically finish asap so we could do other things.
And I think this wasn't a "just my class" kind of thing.
Interesting. On page 34 of the report there's this:
> Hasty responses (percentage of responses that are both incorrect and fast – average across reading items)
Spain is at 9.7%, which is a bit over 8.9% oecd average.
> in Spain kids don't take these tests seriously
Is there evidence for this attitude not generalizing?
I don't have any other evidence, but if there are any Spaniards here I would like to hear what they think
The U.S. scores are interesting. On page 28, look at the column that says "Share of top performers" (in science, reading or mathematics): https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report....
The U.S. is at 17.8% top performers, well behind Japan and Korea but around the same as Canada and Switzerland. But the U.S. is significantly ahead of the big EU countries: Germany is at 14%, France is at 9.8%, Italy is at 10.1% and Spain is at 7%.
> The U.S. scores are interesting.
Unfortunately, those scores are not reliable. It is a recurring problem with the USA for the PISA studies.
The preliminary chapter explains why data has lower confidence is some places. For the USA, there were many problems, including political reluctance in some states or schools, that lead to uncontrolled biases. Notably, the ratio of unreachable children is 40 %, twice more than their upper limit for valid results.
You think parents off-loading parenting to YouTube brainrot since 2014-2015 might have something to do with this? No, it must be SOCIAL MEDIA.
Parents used to offload parenting to streets, fields and forests for decades. I don't think the offloading is the cause. But switching the offloading provider to SOCIAL MEDIA (of which Youtube is one) might've been.
The modern trend is parents spending a lot more time and involvement with their kids then used to be the norm. The norm was that kid were outside unsupervised doing whatever. The expectation on parents went up rather then down.
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What were the sample sizes in previous years and their related demographics?Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn't really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force.
AI already writes most of the articles I see posted here, is doing math at the level of the best mathematicians, and is writing a ton of the code out there. Given another decade to develop, the kids will be hitting the workforce with very stiff competition. It's not a shock they're putting their energy elsewhere, and I can't say they're wrong.
They may be the first generation who grow up fully catered to by AI.
> is doing math at the level of the best mathematics
Terence Tao a few days ago [1]:
> When we point the AIs at really difficult problems where none of the standard techniques apply, they are still very, very bad, I mean they're just randomly guessing.
Please don't reply saying they'll be proving the Collatz conjecture next week. It adds nothing.
[1] https://youtu.be/svl_1upFpQo (worth watching on the role of LLMs in maths)
The best mathematicians are also not very good at solving the hardest problems though. By definition.
Aren't the best mathematicians the best at solving the hardest problems? I don't see how you can argue this without assuming an arbitrary scale for being "good" at something.
Let's see you solve some open problems before you dismiss LLM capabilities. They're working at a level far beyond all but the best of the best.
And we're only a couple of years in. Their capabilities aren't going to be getting worse over time. These kids will be hitting the workforce after AI has another decade of improvement put into it.
I quoted Terence Tao. Are you suggesting he hasn't solved any open problems?
Sure, if these kids can all perform at Tao's level, they could likely be able to keep up with the AI capabilities from a decade before they would enter the workforce.
I was clear on what I was responding to, and quoted it: "is doing math at the level of the best mathematics". This is misinformation and a public perception that will harm maths as it continues to spread. For some actual insight on the relationship between human and LLM maths (including on why thinking of it in terms of "levels" is misguided), see the video I linked.
Your broader point is based on a future extrapolation of LLM capabilities that is far from guaranteed to play out, so it sounds like poor risk management to me, even accepting your framing of it purely in terms of value in the workforce (which I don't).
The decline started in early to mid 2010's, this has little to do with AI.
> Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn't really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force.
If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible.
I mean, what's the alternative? AI does everything for me and I play Fortnite all day? Might as well plug yourself into the Matrix.
It's not clear if it is foolish.
The situation will probably be like with airline pilots. The plane is mostly an automated system, but we simply don't let automation to work through exceptional situations, without human review. Therefore, lots of pilot training (and their presence) is still required.
But it's also hard to guess what exactly skill should the pilots have. It's clear that lots of things from manual aircraft do not translate well to automated.
Children of the Magenta Line seems very topical, especially wrt AI
>In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren VanderBurgh gave a lecture warning about the dangers of autopilot. He titled it "children of the magenta line," after the magenta coloured course line the flight computer draws across a cockpit display. He noticed that pilots were so used to following that line, to managing the automation rather than actually flying the plane, that they lost their own skills to manually fly the plane. This wasn’t a problem until it was a problem.
>VanderBurgh’s concern was not about autopilot itself but rather the complete dependency on autopilot at the expense of the internal knowledge of how it works and the loss of the judgment to know when to use it. In 2009, his warning came true in the very worst way possible over the Atlantic. When Air France 447’s sensors iced over, the autopilot handed a perfectly good airliner back to its crew, the pilots, confused and out of practice, stalled it into the sea.
-https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/children-of-the-magenta-...
Children Of The Magenta Line -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
Just like kids eventually take over most of the daily tasks for their parents (for people in countries where you don't have any kind of retirement fund and assisted living, etc.). Same will happen here - on one hand because the human population keeps growing older without any replacement and on the other because all the new tech will be too complicated for humans to understand.
Most people do not have the ability to understand a domain at the deepest possible level.
It seems unlikely that we'll be able to keep up with AI in any capacity. Your alternative seems like the inevitable outcome of AI succeeding, and it doesn't sound so bad.
Dunno man, the articles ai writes are empty cardboard crap, and the code it produces is hot garbage. “Cleaner upper of AI messes” might be a good future skill to have.
I don't think you can dismiss the output quality so easily.
Give yourself a few hours to write out some code in the old way. Can you really tell me that you could not have done a better job with AI in the same time?
Eg, implement chess or poker games.
Or write a component like a Swiss table.
It's not obvious to me that AI produces bad work at all.
That’s the thing - many times it’s not obvious. But go check that chunk of code that, sure, works, and you’ll find subtleties that just don’t look right. But hey - you do you if that’s the kind of quality you’re happy with.
And traditionally written code won't have those subtleties? Really?
As has been said before we've been cleaning up garbage code for generations and that doesn't look even close to changing anytime soon.
100%, does it matter if I cleanup the mess of another dev or of an AI? I don't think so.
Can other devs spew out crap at the same speed at AI? Cleaning up fifteen 10kloc pull requests per day? Yeah didn’t think so.
I hope people recognize this account doom posts what amounts to misanthropic propaganda at a very high rate. There’s never any question how the comment is going to be framed. It’s always, “give up little humans, your robot overlords are here.”
Yep, I've noticed that myself. It's getting pretty boring.
Yes, kids are the demographics known for long term thinking and rational decision making.
Where do you think they are putting their energy?
Yup, this is "inclusive education" effects, predicted long time ago by education experts. Kids with special needs (from handicapped to criminals) are thrown into regular schools and classes, making education totally inefficient. In Poland one of the best on the World system of special education is being demolished in the name of this absurdity. But this is what people voted for.
Because illegal immigration, Tiktok, and "AI".
Hong Kong crashed hard and nobody could see why /s
Great. With later and later retirement dates, its important that the younger generations are easier to compete with. /s
That's quite funny, but the new recruits at my work place are super smart and full of piss and vinegar. Much more motivated than some of the older workers. The problem is that they will work lots of unpaid overtime, and they have no idea about work boundaries and being exploited by employers.
Sounds like they're trading excess energy for accelerated development. Where do I sign up?
The excess energy dissipates when you realise the commensurate rewards don't materialise, after a few years. But if you also have family wealth, it doesn't matter so much.
Depends on how well they translate that effort into promotions or company switches into better positions.
I averaged around 18mo to either a promotion or a move in my 20s, mostly off the back of working harder (to get the promotions/comp increases) and working smarter (to work out when they aren't coming and jumping somewhere else).
If this makes sense for someone has a lot more to do with their ambition/desire and ability to work the system than anything else. It also helps a ton if you are also legitimately very good at what you do. Then it's pretty easy because you are just demanding you are paid commensurate with impact.
Simply doing overtime and having hustle doesn't cut it though, you actually need to be able to leverage it into career progress or it's just wasted life.
Depending on the education/age of new recruits, you might not have seen much of the, younger, lower scored cohort, because the sharp performance drop only really started after 2018 (so the oldest affected people are around 22).
You're right. I suspect there are class factors at play too. A lot of education happens in the home when you're privileged.
on the other hand, they'll be taking care of us when we're old :(