The OECD attributes the PISA errors to the "negative disposition" of Spanish students after taking several exams

• Education.The PISA report freezes the data from Spain on Reading because at least 5% of the students did not respond rigorously
• Education: The unresolved mystery of PISA: criticism of the OECD skyrockets over its silence on the report's flaws
• Education: The shadows of PISA: should we believe the report after the errors detected?
• Education.Madrid asks the OECD to withdraw the entire PISA report for "errors of a considerable caliber": "All the evidence is contaminated

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) did not publish last year the Spanish results of Reading the PISA Report because it found "anomalies" in the students' responses. This generated a scandal that led regions such as Madrid or Catalonia to question the reliability of the most comprehensive statistics on the academic performance of 15-year-old students in 79countries. Seven months later, the international organization has finished its analysis to see what exactly went wrong in the Spanish case. In a report published this Thursday, it indicates that students from some regions "were negatively disposed towards the PISA test and did not do everything possible to demonstrate their competence" because the evaluation coincided with the final exams of 4th ESO and they finished fed up and saturated.

"A clear association can be established between the date of the exam and the proportion of students with abnormalities," says the OECD analysis, which ensures that the more PISA matches other evaluations, the more errors increase.

In 2018, several autonomous communities eliminated the September recoveries and advanced that examination to June. This forced the entire school calendar to be modified and the finals to be held in the third and fourth weeks of May. Coinciding with PISA. The calendar was chaotic. There were 4th ESO students who had the Physics final exam at 10:00 and the PISA exam at 12:00. The OECD report, carried out with contributions from the Ministry of Education, indicates that in those regions where other tests were carried out on those days, the percentage of "implausible" responses increased by 16%. In the internal survey they conducted, there were many students who "admitted that they had spent very little effort on the PISA test": on an effort scale of 1 to 10, they were 1, 2 or 3.

"Although the data from only a minority of students shows clear signs of lack of commitment, the comparability of the PISA 2018 data for Spain with that of previous PISA evaluations cannot be fully guaranteed," he warns.

The OECD is going to incorporate this data into the global report but with all the cautions and annotations. The Ministry of Education has also decided to disseminate the results on its website and provide them to the CCAA. Why are they published? "It is a good question," responds an official OECD spokesperson, who insists that the data "are not valid in terms of being comparable with results from previous years or with those obtained in other countries." "It is the choice of the Spanish Ministry to publish the results," he says.

According to the analysis carried out by the OECD in November, 5% of Spanish students responded to a new section of the Reading exam -that of Reading Fluency-- "with an unlikely behavior". They used thoughtless "patterns"; for example, saying to everything yes or everything no. In many cases, they answered "hastily, using less than 25 seconds total to answer more than 20 questions" when those who did well spent up to two minutes. As this evaluation was done by computer, the actions were recorded and it was possible to follow up. Meanwhile, the Reading data remained hidden, in quarantine.

THE POLEMICAL QUESTIONS

The part of the Reading Contaminated test urged students to say whether or not they considered logical phrases such as "Airplanes are built with dogs" or "The red car has a flat tire." They were very simple questions, which were rather aimed at students at very basic levels in developing countries.

These data that Celaá now publishes give Spain 477 points in Reading, a dozen points less than the average and the worst result in the last 14 years. You have to go back to 2006 to find such bad grades (then we got 461 points), which place our students at the level of Belarus.

What is worrying, in any case, is that we have dropped 19 points compared to the previous edition, which places us in the equivalent of half an academic year of delay. In addition, the huge differences between the Autonomous Communities are once again evident: between the 497 points in Castilla y León and the 404 in Ceuta there is an abyss of two academic courses of difference.

Furthermore, we are not only far removed from the excellence of China (555), Singapore (549), Estonia (523) or Finland and Canada (520), but we are also overtaken by most of our neighbors -United Kingdom (504) , Germany (498), France (493), Portugal (492) -, which places the Lomce generation that of those born in the housing bubble who have suffered the most from the economic crisis, in a situation of inferiority to compete in a world globalized.

The data, in any case, must be viewed at a distance. Navarra, which has been the best region in Mathematics (with 503 points), is in Reading at the level of the Canary Islands, with only 472 points. That is, the thirteenth remains when it was third in the previous edition.

Also Madrid, which in PISA 2015 was the second best, fell in 2018 to the eleventh position, with 474 points that place it almost as the Canary Islands. It has been a 46 point plummet, the equivalent of a full course.

"It is true that a student may have a greater interest or competence in one subject over the others, but more surprising would be that a majority of students in one class, center or geographical area consistently had a better result in the same subject over the others" , says Ismael Sanz , professor at the Rey Juan Carlos University and former chair of the PISA Strategic Development Group.

The credibility of the exam is undermined, since in previous years errors have also been registered in other countries, which has triggered pisakepticism around the world. The Community of Madrid, which has paid 300,000 euros to participate in the report, even asked the OECD to withdraw the results from Mathematics and Science , arguing that "the entire test was contaminated". Why?

Firstly, because the result in these areas of 60% of the students was obtained by extrapolating the Reading marks, which led the OECD to recognize that these data were also affected by this "anomalous behavior", although to a lesser extent " In addition, Madrid suspected that part of the examiners, subcontracted by the Ministry to the TYPSA company , could give confusing instructions to the students, because those who were under their supervision presented 30% errors compared to others who only made 6% of failures.

The main hypothesis that was handled then was that the questions that went to the beginning of the questionnaire could be interpreted by the students as a training that was not part of the exam itself and that led them, in November 2018, to respond hastily and without rigor, either because the instructions were given badly, or because the company that designed the computer program did not make it clear enough. Other "inconsistencies" were also found in the report's database. None of this clarifies the OECD in a report of just eight pages.

Sources from the Madrid Ministry of Education continue to consider the results "totally inaccurate". "They do not reflect in any way the real level of our students nor do they correspond to the work, effort and commitment of our teachers," they say.

"These data are absolutely surprising considering the results of previous editions, where we occupy the first places with Castilla y León, " they emphasize.

Whatever the data, the teachers agree that "students are reading with more and more difficulty". "While the school is still focused on emotional experiments, students are no longer able to even read the statements. They understand less and less, so that education becomes more of a career that must finish soon than in a field where you have than study, read or analyze ", warns Andreu Navarra , professor at an institute in the province of Barcelona.

NEXT PISA IS DELAYED A YEAR FOR COVID

The OECD has decided to postpone the next two PISA reports due to the Covid-19 crisis. The test takes place every three years and played in 2021, but the exam will be done in 2022 and the results will be published in December 2023. The next one will be published in 2026, not in 2025. "The tests carry a previous field study in that a test is carried out on the test itself, to know if the questions make it possible to differentiate between the students who excel and those who are lagging behind or if there are any problems with the statements, for example. that still surrounds the coronavirus crisis have led the OECD to delay, "explains Ismael Sanz , professor at the Rey Juan Carlos University and former chair of the PISA Strategic Development Group. "In any case, it is very important that this test continues to be carried out, to find out whether the pronounced decline in Spain in 2018 has been circumstantial or real and, more relevant still, what is the effect of the closure of educational centers on learning the students".

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• PISA report
• OECD
• Education
• society
• Isabel Celaá

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