Don’t blame the computers for poor scores

Recent PISA score (shown in today’s newspaper) from the OECD has shown Japan has dropped from 4th to 8th in the ranking for Reading. A government official was quoted as saying the lower score was due to the change to an all-computerised testing system, and that students were confused as to how to answer questions. But isn’t it true that all other students from around the world had the same conditions of this new test format?

Either Japan heavily prepares their students for these tests (which I suspect might be true) or they cannot cope with change. 

Think again. The students sitting for these tests are not the same students for the last test. So one must assume some kind of priming (preparing) is occurring here. So I guess it is not the students who cannot cope  with change.