The findings published in the OECD’s latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey highlighted concerns about functional literacy voiced at the highest level in the South Caucasus country.
The 2025 survey, in which Armenia participated for the first time, assessed about 760,000 students aged 15 in 91 countries and economies.
According to the results, only about 1 percent of Armenian students achieved top performance levels in mathematics, while almost no students reached the highest levels in science and reading. Armenia ranked below other countries in the region, including Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey, in all three subjects.
Armenian students also trailed Uzbekistan, Moldova, Romania and Kazakhstan, outperforming among post-Soviet states only Kyrgyzstan.
The OECD said that 28 percent of Armenian students achieved at least the baseline level of proficiency in mathematics and science, compared with OECD averages of 65 percent and 74 percent, respectively.
In reading, the figure for Armenia stood at 19 percent, far below the OECD average of 67 percent, with almost no students scoring at a level where it is believed that students can “comprehend lengthy texts, deal with concepts that are abstract or counterintuitive, and establish distinctions between fact and opinion.”
In this assessment, the average score of Armenian students who scored above the baseline proficiency level was more than twice as low as the average across participating countries.
The PISA assessment is regarded as one of the world’s leading measures of educational performance, and its findings are closely studied by governments and education experts.
East Asian education systems, including in four Chinese provinces (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, lead the PISA global rankings, while the United Kingdom and Estonia are also among the top performers in reading, mathematics and science.
Armenian authorities have publicly raised concerns about functional illiteracy among students in recent years. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said in 2022 that the issue constituted a matter of national security.