Saudi 15-year-olds struggle to apply what they learn, OECD report shows

Almost no Saudi 15-year-old can take what they learn in class and apply it to an unfamiliar, open-ended problem, according to the OECD’s latest global assessment of school students. The university lecturers who eventually teach these students say that’s the gap they run into most frequently.

Saudi students scored below the OECD average in every subject of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 (pdf), and their results have barely moved since the last assessment in 2022. In each subject, almost none reached Level 5 or 6, the band that tests whether students can apply knowledge to problems they haven’t seen before. The OECD average for those levels is 6-8%.

“The biggest gap I see is between academic attainment and the ability to translate knowledge into practice,” King Saud University assistant professor of media and assistant vice dean for academic affairs at its College of Arts Nouf Alhamdan tells EnterpriseAM. Students can explain a concept in an exam, she says, but struggle when it comes to applying it to a real situation where there isn’t a single correct answer demands other skills such as decision-making, working with ambiguity, collaboration, and seeing a project through.

How the scores looked: Some 7.3k students across 203 schools sat for the test. They averaged 390 in math, 387 in reading, 413 in science, and 426 in computational problem solving. In math, just 32% cleared the baseline proficiency level against an OECD average of 65%.

The trend line is close to flat. Compared with 2022, math and reading were flat and only science rose. The gap between the top and bottom 10% of students widened in math and science, and held steady in reading. Stretch the view back to 2018, when Saudi first participated in the program, and the picture improves: math and science improved significantly, while reading slipped. The share of students below baseline fell 13 percentage points in science and rose seven in reading.

Alhamdan also sees weakness in some students’ Arabic. Many struggle to build an argument in Modern Standard Arabic and drift into colloquial usage where formal language is expected. “The ability to articulate an idea precisely is closely connected to the ability to think through that idea.”

AI is now part of how most students work. Some 54% of Saudi students use chatbots for schoolwork at least weekly, above the OECD’s 46%, and only 8% never do. Alhamdan calls the tools useful for brainstorming, research, and translation. Her concern is twofold: “when AI begins to replace the student’s own thinking,” and that copied-in answers make it “considerably more difficult to assess what a student genuinely understands.” She now asks students to explain and defend their work in person, and says the sector “urgently” needs clear rules on acceptable use.

On motivation, the survey cuts both ways. Saudi 15-year-olds report more grit than their OECD peers — 68% say they push harder when work gets difficult, against an average of 60% — though fewer describe themselves as curious about many things, at 65% versus 73%.

Alhamdan sees the same split in her own classroom. The encouraging shift, she says, is a rise in self-directed learners who teach themselves editing software and AI tools through online resources, experimentation, and peer learning — though digital proficiency varies widely and the habit is far from universal. Against that, she describes a decline, since she began teaching in 2014, in “sustained attention and depth of engagement,” with more students “looking for shortcuts.”

The bright spot? The Kingdom does better than most on equity. Its most and least advantaged students are 47 points apart in science, sitting well inside the OECD gap of 85 points.

Attendance is less bright: Two-thirds of students had missed at least a full day of school in the two weeks before the test, three times the OECD’s 22% and up from 61% in 2022.