[whateverboat]

I think the problems are deeper. The problems are at school level. The variance in the level of schooling in US is huge compared to Italy in my experience. This factor means that school exams are not a good indicator of competitiveness.

Furthermore, the social systems in Italy mean that the failure is not that problematic especially for kids from poor backgrounds. And therefore, risk of depression etc was much lower.

In short what I want to say is that the university exam system is not as important as the social security/welfare state for better student outcomes.

This also ties into Harvard's grade inflation. If you think about it, if only the countries best mathematicians are joining Harvard, it doesn't make sense for any of them to receive a D on a mathematics course just because they are not that good compared to the rest of the class but are still in top 2% country wise.

The real problem here again is that US has a few good universities and a lot of bad ones. But this again, can just also be due to the size of US, but also is affected by social welfare state and equality.

[znpy]

> The problems are at school level.

Imho the problems are even deeper: they’re at culture level.

But that’s where things get controversial, so i’ll hint at the problems and stop here.

[bmm6o]

You mean the culture of cutting funding from under performing schools to enforce a downward spiral and divert money to private schools? If not you should be more specific.

[znpy]

(The two sibling comments confirm i was right at only hinting at the problem and avoiding the quarrels. No one of the two commenters is trying to engage in a healthy and honest conversation. That’s another sign of a… cultural issue)

[kelipso]

He is definitely not talking about school exams. He is talking about either university entrance exams or exams in university classes.