Wow, very interesting tool. Look at the comparison between the USA Quant and any Asia country's Quant. A 44Q in the US is an 87% while in China it is a 21%!!! Incredible!

There has to be some element of selection bias in this data, right? As in only the cream of the crop take the GMAT in China?

If China has such super engineers why are their bullet trains flying off bridges and other shit melting down haha.

But yeah, their quant scores fuck normal Americans. Pretty silly considering an MBA is not very quantitative.

And of course, the difference between South Korea & Japan is that their total population is only 165 million. China is 1.2-1.3 billion. The amount of economic turmoil that will end up happening when their GDP per capita increases will be unlike anything we've ever seen.

Welcome *high skill* immigrants. Welcoming illiterate peasants isn't a good way to win the patent game.

http://www.chineseorjapanese.com/asians-good-at-math/

From the article:

As English speakers, we may be unaware, but the English language is perhaps the most odd and irrational language around. Particularly with numbers, in English, after ten the teens each have an unique name and each tenth following that gets their own name. In fact, one would need to learn 28 unique words to count up to 100 in English while in any Chinese dialect, Japanese, or Korean, one only needs to learn 11 – one through ten and one hundred.

In Asian languages like Chinese, numbers after ten follow a precise logic. Eleven in Mandarin is shi yi or ten-one, twelve is ten-two, thirteen is ten-three, and so forth. When we get to fifty-nine, the logic continues, five-ten-nine. Five tens and a nine, 59. The internal logic in counting numbers with Asian languages results in kids who speak Asian languages are able to count beyond a hundred before English speakers can even count to 40. But the Asian language advantage doesn’t stop in counting. Remember those dreaded fractions? In English we would read 3/4 as three-fourths. But for languages like Chinese, 3/4 is literally translated, “out of 4 parts, take 3″.

When you think how much more sense math makes for Asian-language speakers and considering how many frustrated 3rd graders go home with there hands crossed because multiplication doesn’t make sense. How much fun would math had been if it did make sense? Wouldn’t you do more homework? In turn wouldn’t you pick up new concepts – in which case math heavily depends on learning piece by piece – easier.

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It's probably a combination of the language advantage, extreme work ethic, and cultural preference for math. Asian countries in general also have a different educational system that is more focused on rote learning than the Western system. I'm not saying that is a good thing or a bad thing overall, but it's not hard to imagine how that could give someone an advantage in math, which at most levels (excluding really high-end stuff) is more rote / drill-based than other topics in education (say, writing). I think it's a fine line between generalizing and being racist, but my experience is that a lot of Asians from Asia are fantastic at drill type exercises within a finite range of material (such as you would find in GMAT quant -- there's only so many ways that test can hit you) than they would be in assignments requiring more "creative" application of skills. A balanced approach is probably best.

The data shows a couple of interesting points. In no particular order:

* thank god for old people. They severely underperform on the quant (40+ group), great for the rest of us. Never discourage your uncles and aunts from doing an EMBA!

* The United States is the absolute WORST performer in math amongst industrialized and emerging nations, according to that survey. The northern neighbor, Canada, is similar but still slightly better.

* Europe's greatest industrial countries perform better than North America in math but not as well as Asia. France is slightly better than Germany. Those countries retain a heavy engineering bias, so while that helps, it is not the quick fix some might think it is.

* In Asia, there is a fairly tight cluster around India, Japan and Taiwan, all performing at similar levels. In two of these cases, the base-10 linguistic structure exists, with one country being more capitalistic than China and speaking the same language. China's overachievement cannot be reduced solely to culture and language.

* South Korea is a distant number two to China's staggering number one. That said, they're the top two: one is capitalist and industrialized, the other is a market-manipulating dictatorship nominally under the stewardship of the Communist party. They speak different languages but both have a base-10 structure.

* On the one hand, this confirms what I thought for a long time: the 80/80 rule, coined close to 10 years ago (when Far East Asian applicants were a smaller portion of the applicant pool), is now dangerously obsolete. A quant 45 is 89th percentile in America, and would've passed Wharton's shit-test in say 2005, but now it doesn't. Schools (and admissions consultants) need to reassess their understanding of the scores, which have been thrown way off kilter. If they want to stay as competitive as possible, that's one thing. But if they feel that quant 43 folks aren't actually capable of handling the coursework, well, they were admitting throngs of those guys 5 years ago, except back then, that same ability put you in the 80th percentile range.

* On the other hand, the loss of quantitative competitiveness in the United States (and perhaps the West as a whole) is real, though in relative terms there will always be a cultural bias in the East towards numeracy. Without better engineers, in the West we're going to produce less Newtons, Graham-Bells, Edisons, and Steve Wozniaks. But the West not being a society that exclusively rewards number crunchers is also why we have Greco-Roman mythology, Leonardo da Vinci, Bach, Hitchcock, Paco de Lucía, George Orwell and Steve Jobs.

Thanks man. da Vinci was an all-around bad-ass Renaissance man.

No wonder the French suck at math.

98 in French = 4*20+10+8

Seriously. Ninety-eight in French is Quatre-Vingt-Dix-Huit (literally four 20's plus 18).

Hahah, what? Didn't know that.

In Italian its 1 to 10, then a structure fro 11-20, and a structure from 20 to infinte.
So I guess they are a little bit better off...

In my mother tongue (east european) there's a similar pattern, although the third structure is a little bit more intuitive (in italian its first syllabe of the tens + units, in my mother tongue it's tens+units)

Both, plus the pool tends to be of a higher caliber - SAT is for high schoolers trying to get into college, whereas the GMAT is usually motivated, professionally-driven college graduates trying to get into grad school. The curve has become even harder on the math side because Asia's best and brightest have joined the race in VERY large numbers.

Males vs. Females: not equal.

I think its more heavily influenced by selection bias than most people here think. No one in China takes the GMAT to with hopes of going to Appalachin State Graduate School of Business. People in China leave to go to top tier programs mostly, so there is a massive selection bias going on. Average or median Chinese b-school aspirants don't come to the US for school and so don't take the GMAT.

And the population size means they can field 4x as many 99th percentile applicants.

I really think it's not true that Chinese people are somehow gifted at math. I think it's more that the top Chinese students grow up in an environment that stresses quantitative subject. In China, there's no 'nerd' stigma attached to being excellent at quantitative subjects. In fact that's what Chinese students strive for. Completely different than in America where you're a loser if you're into math and science. And honestly, Chinese parents just straight up push their kids way harder than American parents do. But I don't think it's genetic.

I went to school that was extremely international, and based on the people I met, Persians were absolutely insanely good at high school math, followed by mainland chinese, the taiwanese, eastern europeans/russians, then latins/us/canadians/western europeans

Then me. I got an 82% on senior math, but I was in the bottom 20% of the class. top 20% all got 99%

Persian, Chinese secondary education in math > other far east countries > eastern europe, russia > the western world.

really interesting that Canada does the best in AWA and Verbal... compared to all categories (i.e. countries,degrees,sex, etc.)

those smart asians!

agree with Alex, Asians do more maths in general.

Also, self selection bias. Everybody in the MBA has heard of MBAs, so any random guy can apply and try. In China or Korea and even Japan, MBAs are reserved for a certain "elite".
In China not many people can afford it, only the kids that are either rich or very successful, and they are either smarter or have more resource to spend on tuitions and preparation.
For Japan and Korea, its more that only really really ambitious people want to shoot for an MBA, and there are very few people from those countries who are not sponsored from their corporates (because of the corporate culture and because people are naturally risk averse), so there is already a form of "preselection". Also a big portion of Asians that live in the US apply and those are the cream of the crop in their countries.

Finally - they prepare much more. There is a stigma associated with waste and failure in those countries, so they will only take the exam after they are quite confident that they can get a decent score.

Reading comprehension, folks.

The tool doesn't isolate for race.

It isolates for country.

99.9% of the test-takers in China, Japan, India and South Korea are going to be locals of Han or Desi ethnicity.

Test-takers in the United States are of any race - they just happen to be in the US.

As a result, this isn't a racial comparison.

Non-white test-takers in France are more likely to be of North African ethnicity, so French plus North African doesn't make for a good like-for-like with the US, where there will be White, Africa, Asian, Hispanic and Native-Americans taking the test.

This isn't about race, it's about the educational system (first and foremost) and secondly the language and socioeconomic demographics. If it were purely about race and language, then China and Taiwan would have the exact same performance.

I'm a little disappointed.

How is what you just said not about race?

Uh, the previous poster said that he was isolating for race.

That's a category error. The data isolates by location of test-takers.

Further, there's the erroneous assumption that the US is somehow "white", as would be France. Hence driving the "isolating by race". It's wrong on two levels.

Re-read.