Publication: India Shining and Bharat Drowning : Comparing Two Indian States to the Worldwide Distribution in Mathematics Achievement
Date
2008-06
ISSN
Published
2008-06
Author(s)
Abstract
This paper uses student answers to
publicly released questions from an international testing
agency together with statistical methods from Item Response
Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states
-Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of
mathematics achievement. These two states fall below 43 of
the 51 countries for which data exist. The bottom 5 percent
of children rank higher than the bottom 5 percent in only
three countries-South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. But
not all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-score
distribution for both states is next only to South Africa in
the worldwide ranking exercise. Consequently, and to the
extent that these two states can represent India, the two
statements "for every ten top performers in the United
States there are four in India" and "for every ten
low performers in the United States there are two hundred in
India" are both consistent with the data. The
combination of India's size and large variance in
achievement give both the perceptions that India is shining
even as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning.
Comparable estimates of inequalities in learning are the
building blocks for substantive research on the correlates
of earnings inequality in India and other low-income
countries; the methods proposed here allow for independent
testing exercises to build up such data by linking scores to
internationally comparable tests.
Citation
“Das, Jishnu; Zajonc, Tristan. 2008. India Shining and Bharat Drowning : Comparing Two Indian States to the Worldwide Distribution in Mathematics Achievement. Policy Research Working Paper No. 4644. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/78bf7bb6-a254-5350-b6ee-3139f13c55b7 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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