Their goal is to get into “the right university.” A
common belief among Korean students is that they
can enter college if they get four hours of sleep
each night—but not if they sleep five or more. Of
course, one drawback, or disadvantage, is that
Korean students experience exhaustion and a great
deal of stress. From this example, it seems that
students from countries with high PISA scores have
to work very hard. On the other hand, in Finland,
children do not start school until they are seven years old. They don’t have
to worry about grades because teachers don’t give grades until high school.
In high school, teachers give grades, but there are no lists with rankings of
students from low to high. Perhaps most interesting, students have very little
homework, and yet Finnish students still rank very high on the PISA exams.
It appears that hard, competitive work is not the only road to success.