You must remember the Chinese Gov’t is all about “face” and appearances, especially in Shanghai. Its absolutely true that Chinese students are forced to study harder, move at a faster pace, and do much more homework.
At the same time though, remember that Shanghai is China’s most modern and wealthiest city. I have no doubts also that the Shanghai Gov’t arranged for their best schools to take this test.
“Its absolutely true that Chinese students are forced to study harder, move at a faster pace, and do much more homework.”
Because it works.
There may be a part of this in there, but when I was in high school, we had a chinese exchange teacher teach at my school for about three years. He was here on a training visa, he taught english in China. He gave us very extensive information on how their school system works, and the main point I took away was that ‘young students’ (ie. elementary through high school) don’t do a lot of non-school activities during the school week. They attended like 8 hours of school, plus they usually spent another 1-2 hours doing at-school study and or school cleanup projects. Then they would go home and do 2-3 hours of home study. Every day. Basically, students didn’t ‘earn’ the right to ‘party’ or have social lives until they entered college. Additionally, it was very common for mothers of the students to attend classes with elementary-age students so that they could help their children with their studies.
In the USA, students of Asian descent score higher than Caucasians.
No surprise.