Reading Scores for 15-Year-Olds Just Hit a Century Low

Reading Scores for 15-Year-Olds Just Hit a Century Low

The OECD has published its 2025 PISA results. The average across member countries came in at 463 in mathematics, 461 in reading and 482 in science, with maths and reading both the lowest the assessment has ever recorded. On the chart, which tracks a fixed sample of 23 countries with data back to 2000, all three lines fall together.

For a sense of scale, average reading scores fell 28 points between 2015 and 2025. The OECD puts that at roughly a year and a half of learning.

The three subjects did not fall the same way. Science drifted down gently. Maths and reading turned sharply lower after 2018. Closed schools alone would have pulled all three down together and at the same moment.

The report contains a measure more concrete than the scores. The share of what it calls hasty readers, students who skim a passage and give a quick wrong answer, almost doubled between 2018 and 2025. The OECD notes that longer screen time and falling rates of reading for pleasure accompanied the decline, while stressing these are trends alongside the results rather than proven causes.

What fell furthest was evaluating information, connecting multiple sources and thinking critically about what has been read. The report's own framing is that these matter most in the AI age. When machines produce the answer, judging whether the answer is any good is the part left to people, and that is precisely where the scores are going down.

Source: OECD PISA 2025 Results and Deutsche Bank Research (Image: @BrianSozzi)