KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 9 — DAP’s Lim Kit Siang today continued to question the improvement in Malaysia’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) score as calculated by Putrajaya.

In a statement today, Lim claimed that the data used by the Education Ministry was not recognised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that conducts the ranking.

"Malaysia’s results were mentioned in Annex B of Volume 1, from page 320 to 442, as  9,660  15-year-old students from 230 schools had participated in the PISA 2015 tests, but together with Argentina and  Kazakhstan, they were three countries isolated from the main PISA 2015 findings because the data for Malaysia, Argentina and Kazakhstan could not be used for comparison,” Lim said.

Lim pointed out that the report had highlighted Malaysia’s response rate in the study of 51 per cent, below the necessary 85 per cent to be included in the PISA.

He then pressed Putrajaya to explain how it arrived at the scores.

On Wednesday, Education deputy director-general  Datuk Dr Amin Senin said that Malaysians students registered better scores in mathematics, science and reading according to the latest PISA results.

Despite the ministry’s announcement, Malaysia was absent from the official PISA report.