Macao is a small city situated on the western side of Pearl River estuary. It has a population of less than half a million and a history of more than four hundred years. Macao’s educational system is characterized by the fact that the majority of its schools are privately-operated. Many of these private schools still receive a large annual subsidy from the government. This is because the policy in Macao is 15 years of free obligatory education and this is applicable not only to the few public schools but also to private schools joining the school-nets. In Macao, all private schools are given full administrative autonomy and complete freedom of instruction, and there is as yet no territory-wide public examination from kindergarten through high school. While this might seem like a good thing, it also means that the public has no way to objectively evaluate the educational achievement of schools, even though the schools may be rather different and aim to serve different communities. Thus a system of standardized evaluation with clearly spelled out benchmarks is necessary so that the government can justify to the public the amount of money it is spending on education. Therefore, it is heartening to learn that PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment), a flagship research program conducted by the Educational Testing and Assessment Research Centre (ETARC) of the University of Macau (UM), now serves as a catalyst for capacity building of essential research personnel for conducting educational evaluation in Macao. In particular, the assessment of mathematical, scientific, and reading literacy in PISA 2003, 2006 and 2009 studies covers pertinent school subject areas. This allows the public to see for the first time, from both intra-system and intersystem educational perspectives, how 15-year-old students perform after completing their obligatory basic education in the Macao school system (see Lo and Cheung, 2005; Cheung and Sit, 2007).