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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

>In Finland, students aren’t subjected to standardized tests

This is incorrect, but seems to be repeated in most of these articles about the Finnish education system.

>nor is it possible to fail a grade.

I don't know about the current state of affairs, but at least it was possible to "fail a grade", even if it was really rare.

>In Finland, teaching is a highly prestigious profession, equivalent to medicine or law.

I'd say that is exaggerated.

>The school days are shorter and students are almost never given homework.

I'd say homework is more frequent than that.

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For me there was only 2 or 3 sets of standardized tests during 12 years of school.

'No failing grades' isn't really considered a valuable aspect of the system. It's more like a side effect.

Finnish teachers are paid better (relative to other jobs) compared to US. They also have a ridiculous long summer vacation. There is no shortage of highly qualified teachers. But doctors they are not.

Is it really a vacation, I know in my part of Canada it isn't : they don't work but they aren't paid either.

In Finland the school teachers teach from mid-August to end of May. They are paid 12 months. How much they spend time on preparations, administration, whatnot, during the summer months is their own business.

Also the Xmas holiday is about 2 weeks, and then in Finland we a this "skiing holiday", 1 week in February.

>In Finland, students aren’t subjected to standardized tests

This is incorrect, but seems to be repeated in most of these articles about the Finnish education system.

What are you referring to? I'm Finnish and I don't recall doing any standardized tests (except the very final one, the high school graduation exam).

Ironic that the main reason people keep writing about how great the schools are in Finland is their performance on a standardized test (PISA).

PISA is different kind of standardized test than usually meant when talking about them in education context. Not every student participate in PISA and (from what I know) it is not used to actually grade anyone. In Finland, the only nationwide test is the matriculation examination at the end of the high school.

Right, I was just saying it is funny that the people who are championing the non-standardized test based education in Finland use a standardized test as the evidence of success.

The idea is that you find what you measure. Standardised tests are highly informative, but should be kept to a minimum to avoid warping the process. Incidentally, one of the major criticisms leveled against PISA is regarding the inconsistent sampling process.

> the people who are championing the non-standardized test based education in Finland use a standardized test as the evidence of success.

No we don't. When the first splendid PISA results were published in 2003 and 2006, the common theme in Finnish media was to wonder what is wrong with the methodology of those tests, because Finnish school system cannot be world class, no way.

It took years and years of foreign media publicity and foreign interest, before we in Finland slowly started to believe that maybe our schools are, maybe, kind of good, because the rest of the world seems to believe so. And the rest of the world cannot probably be wrong.

I may have worded my comment ambiguously, I am talking about the writers in the US who discovered Finland after noticing the low US scores. I am not talking about any thoughts or opinions or the reality inside of Finland. The entire basis of the attention Finland gets for its schools in the US is the PISA scores.

Why are you just picking sentences which go against your opinion instead of actually writing down your knowledge of the subject?

I actually picked sentences which were wrong.

> > In Finland, students aren’t subjected to standardized tests

> This is incorrect

Apparently there are national standardized tests every three years (near the ends of 3rd, 6th, 9th grades).

But their main purpose is for the government to collect statistics, the grades of individual students are still left for their teachers to decide, the grades do not mechanically follow from the performance in these tests.

Then for the ca. 50% of population who go to gymnasium [1] ("high school"), at the end of 12th grade there are national standardized finals with nationally evaluated grades.

Source: I'm Finnish, just googled these in Finnish.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_%28school%29

Do the tests play into the decision of whether the student goes into a vocational or academic track, or is it an individual choice?

It's individual choice, though higher education institutes do have entrance exams that can occasionally be waived by high grades.

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