PISA has not been designed to assess how well students master the contents of the school curricula,
yet opinion leaders in Finland keep reading PISA results as schools’ report cards indicating the
excellence of education policy in a country. Finland took top positions from the very beginning,
which surprised the Finns themselves. The experienced PISA miracle was then kept alive, until the
2012 assessment’s declining scores delivered a minor “PISA shock” in Finland. PISA 2015, however,
proved that the decline was temporary, but it did not eliminate the worry about Finnish
gender gap in literacy, claimed as widest among the OECD countries, entailing alleged boys’ severe
underachievement. Success in PISA became an integrated part of national identity and Finnish
country brand. The paper problematizes the one-dimensional reasoning of top achievements in
PISA tests as an indication of excellent results of education policy. PISA methodology has to certain
extent been questioned internationally, but the paper examines further the relations between success
of countries in the league tables and the test performance of participating students. The paper
argues that countries’ movements up and down the league tables have necessarily no connection
with students’ performance in PISA’s literary tests. Every three years PISA produces masses of
standardized numerical information, which unfortunately does not redeem the strict requirements
of policy based scientific facts.