To have ones name on the list of the successful problem solvers has always been a source of pride for the school as well. The Journal is published monthly by the E tv s Society in 8000 copies. Szilard is very interested in whether this procedure tan be applied in the German context and this has been the subject of much discussion between us. The most common way of assessing educational outcomes at the student, institution and system levels is to measure the relative performance of students within each country. Several countries from Northern America, Europe, the Far East, and some countries from the Third World participated in these investigations in the past three decades, involving hundred thousands of students, selected carefully to represent the average performance of the countries in a statistically significant way.
Science is a rather compact and culture-independent body of knowledge.
This is why educational experts consider the three IEA science studies to be the most informative assessment available till now for comparing educational performances in different countries. Experts devote highest attention to the scores of the age group 14, because they reflect the outcome of the primary school as well, and at this age in most countries practically the whole population goes to school. E tv s Competition. The problems have to be solved in a closed room, supervised by impartial observes, within an afternoon. At this centenary celebration Kai-hua Zhao, vicepresident of the Chinese Physical Society, stressed that the E tv s Competition might be considered as the forerunner of the International Physics Student Olympiad.