From Why can’t we concentrate? by Laura Miller:
IQ tests have to be regularly updated to make them harder; otherwise the average score would have climbed 3 percent per decade since the early 1930s. (The average score is supposed to remain at a constant 100 points.) And IQ measures problem-solving ability, rather than sheer data retained, which has grown even faster over the same interval.
And here I was thinking all these years that we, as a global population, are in fact getting more and more stupid. People getting lower and lower grades, coming out of the Universities knowing less and less – it was all just an illusion. Average IQ is climbing. Steadily. Decade after decade we are getting smarter. It’s only that there are too few measures noticing it. Are IQ tests the only ones measuring it?
(via Brutto)
