PISA 2025: India Sits Out as Global Learning Scores Hit Historic Lows
The OECD released PISA 2025 results on September 8, 2026, recording the steepest learning decline in the test's history. India was absent. What this means for Indian assessment reform and why outcome measurement can no longer wait.
The Numbers Are In — India Is Not Part of Them
On September 8, 2026, the OECD published PISA 2025 Results (Volume I): *Future-Ready Students*. More than 760,000 fifteen-year-olds from 91 countries and economies sat for the assessment. India was not among them.
PISA — the Programme for International Student Assessment — measures reading literacy, mathematical literacy, and scientific literacy in 15-year-olds every three years. It is the most widely cited cross-country measure of what students can actually do with their education. For the fourth consecutive cycle (India's last participation was a partial pilot in 2022 covering Chandigarh, and its full national debut was in 2009 for Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh), the country opted out.
The absence is not just a statistic about international comparability. It signals something deeper about how India measures, verifies, and values learning outcomes at scale.
What PISA 2025 Found Globally
The 2026 release confirmed a trend that educators had feared for a decade. Global average scores in reading fell 28 points between 2015 and 2025. Mathematics dropped 22 points over the same period and a further 9 points since 2022 alone. The OECD described PISA 2025 as recording the lowest average reading and mathematics performance in the test's 25-year history.
The decline is not confined to struggling economies. Scores fell in advanced systems that had historically performed strongly. Pandemic disruptions between 2020 and 2022 contributed to the drop, but the trend predates COVID-19. PISA 2025 found that the recovery in learning outcomes has been uneven and incomplete in almost every participating country.
Among participating economies:
India's absence means it cannot benchmark its own learning outcomes against these trajectories. There is no national score to celebrate or explain away. There is no baseline against which to measure whether the reforms of the last six years — NEP 2020, the FYUGP restructuring, competency-based grading in CBSE — are actually moving learning outcomes in the right direction.
India's Pattern of Opting Out
India agreed to participate in the PISA 2021 cycle, which was shifted to 2022 due to the pandemic. Chandigarh's participation in 2022 was limited and experimental. For PISA 2025, India declined to participate at the national level again.
The reasons cited over the years have ranged from concerns about question design and cultural bias in OECD instruments, to the administrative complexity of sampling students from a system with over 250 million school-going children. There are also questions about political appetite for an internationally comparable ranking that might unflattering reflect on learning outcomes despite rising enrollment numbers.
That political reluctance is understandable. What is harder to defend is the absence of a domestic equivalent. PISA works because it is independent, longitudinal, and comparable. India has ASER (Annual Status of Education Report), which surveys foundational literacy and numeracy in rural areas and is deeply valuable. But ASER covers rural primary-level learning. It is not a measure of secondary school learning outcomes at the level of curriculum complexity that PISA assesses.
The Ministry of Education's own framework — through PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), the national assessment body established under NEP 2020 — is designed to eventually generate outcome data comparable to international standards. PARAKH conducted the National Achievement Survey in 2021. A follow-up survey has not yet been published at the scale or frequency needed to track system-level reform.
Why Outcome Measurement Matters for India's Institutions
The connection between international assessment data and everyday institutional practice in India is not abstract. It runs directly through the evidence chain that NAAC, NIRF, and UGC now require.
The new NAAC Binary Accreditation framework explicitly measures "Student Learning Outcomes." Under the Maturity-Based Graded Levels (MBGL) track, institutions seeking Level 3 and above must produce evidence that their students are actually learning — not just that curriculum was delivered or examinations were conducted. The One Nation One Data Platform cross-checks institutional claims against AISHE, NIRF, and UDISE+ databases. Outcome evidence that cannot be traced to auditable assessment records is flagged.
NIRF's Teaching, Learning and Resources (TLR) parameter, which carries 30% of the total score, rewards institutions that can demonstrate quality in learning outcomes through structured assessment data. Institutions that track student performance at a granular level — subject by subject, semester by semester — have demonstrably better NIRF submissions.
What PISA 2025 makes visible globally is a truth Indian higher education institutions are beginning to confront domestically: collecting marks is not the same as measuring learning. A student who scores 72% on a university paper and a student who scores 72% on an OECD-benchmarked competency assessment have very different profiles. India's examination systems have historically been excellent at generating marks. They have been less systematic about generating outcome evidence.
The Structural Gap That Digital Evaluation Addresses
For Indian universities evaluating hundreds of thousands of answer books each year, the question of outcome measurement is inseparable from the question of evaluation infrastructure.
Paper-based evaluation produces marks. Those marks travel through spreadsheets, paper registers, and manual compilation processes before arriving at a transcript. The question — which specific competencies did the student demonstrate, across which question types, at which cognitive level — is not asked and not answered.
Digital evaluation platforms change this. When every mark in every question is recorded and tagged at the point of evaluation, the resulting data is analyzable. Faculty can identify which question sections consistently show low marks — indicating a curriculum gap, not just student failure. Controllers of Examinations can run item analysis after each evaluation season to improve question quality. IQAC officers can pull outcome evidence for NAAC submissions without manual reconstruction.
This is precisely the kind of outcome data that PISA measures internationally and that NAAC, NIRF, and PARAKH are beginning to require domestically. The infrastructure to generate it is an evaluation system that captures, stores, and structures assessment data at the item level — not just the total-marks level.
The Window Is Narrow
India is not going to participate in PISA 2028 by default. Participation requires a formal government commitment, a sampling framework, and preparation time. The conversation about whether India should participate — and under what terms — must begin well before the 2028 assessment cycle opens.
What Indian institutions can do now is begin building the domestic assessment infrastructure that would make meaningful PISA participation possible: evaluation systems that track outcomes, not just scores; question banks that map to competency frameworks; analysis tools that move from marks-compilation to learning-outcome reporting.
The PISA 2025 results are a global warning. In 91 countries, learning outcomes are declining despite increasing expenditure on education. India has the advantage of knowing this before it can measure the same trend in its own system. That advantage expires if institutions continue to treat examination as a mark-delivery exercise rather than an outcome-measurement one.
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