Increases in IQ Test Scores

Children's IQ test scores can vary from year to year, depending on factors like their lives at home and their nutrition level. Sometimes, an entire country's IQ goes up at once.

Alan Carr (1993) surveyed the intelligence test results for Irish primary school children between 1972 and 1992. All the children took a multiple-choice test called Raven's Progressive Matrices. This test requires test-takers to look at a sequence of drawings, and then select the drawing that continues the pattern. Over the course of twenty years, the children's median IQ rose from 100 to 110 points, and the number of children who scored in the "superior" range of the test rose from five to seventeen percent.

Obviously, there is no great genetic difference between the 1972 children and the 1992 children. The people in Ireland are the same folks who have been living there for many, many years. Irish children today probably have more time for and access to intellectual stimulation, like computers, than their parents did. Who knows how bright the children of 2012 will be?