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A brother and sister in second grade walk to school on Aug. 17, 2018, in Seoul’s Gangseo District. (Kim Hye-yun/The Hankyoreh)

South Korean students continued showing some of the highest levels in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for academic achievement in reading, math, and science, statistics show.

Analysts attributed this trend to the students maintaining their education through non-face-to-face lessons and other means even during the COVID-19 pandemic. But academic disparities among students and schools remained large.

On Tuesday, the OECD released 2022 findings from its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Conducted every three years, PISA is a study in which the OECD compares the reading, math and science achievement levels of 15-year-old students around the world.

The latest study had around 690,000 participants from 81 countries (37 OECD members and 44 non-members), with 6,931 South Korean students taking part from 186 schools.

Based on its three-year cycle, the study was originally scheduled to take place in 2021, but it ended up postponed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

South Korean students were in the top ranks of academic achievement in all three areas assessed: reading, mathematics and science.

Korean students ranked between first and second in math, first and seventh in reading and second and fifth in science. That kept Korea atop OECD countries after scoring between first and seventh in math, second and seventh in reading and third and fifth in science in the 2018 PISA.

When all 81 countries in the study (including non-OECD member states) are included, Korea ranked between third and seventh in math, second and 12th in reading and second and ninth in science.

PISA administers a test to a sample of students to estimate the academic achievement of the total population of a country. Given that method, country rankings are presented in ranges that take into account the sampling error.

In terms of the average scores of students in the sample, Korean students scored 527 in math, 515 in reading and 528 in science, representing an increase of 1-9 points from their scores on the previous assessments (526 in math, 514 in reading and 519 in science).

That stands in contrast to the average score among OECD member states, which fell by 4-17 points over the same period. South Korea’s Ministry of Education said Koreans had continued to perform well because schools had kept in touch with students through virtual classes held while the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the world.

“Korea handled online classes better than other countries while COVID-19 was spreading, which seems to have helped Korean students feel more attached to their schools than students in other countries,” said an official from the basic academic skills and career education division at the Education Ministry.

The OECD also reported that Korean students have a more positive attitude in the classroom than they used to. Each time PISA is held, the OECD chooses either math, reading or science for a range of different types of analysis; this time around, that subject was math.

The math class attitude index for Korea, which measures how positively Korean students feel about their math classes, was 0.84, up from 0.19 in 2012. The higher the number, the more positively students feel about their classes.

While Korea’s average level of academic achievement was high, the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students and schools in Korea was above the OECD average. Korea had an intra-school dispersion percentage of 98.1%, far above the OECD average of 68.3%.

The dispersion percentage is an index of how far student grades are dispersed around the average score (here, in the subject of math), providing insight into the achievement gap between students attending the same school. The higher the percentage, the greater the disparity between high- and low-performing students.

Korea’s inter-school dispersion percentage (40.3%) in math, a measure of the achievement gap between schools, was also higher than the OECD average of 31.6%.

By Kim Min-je, staff reporter

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