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I've made these maps from all PISA scores available (math, science, reading and problem solving). IMO PISA is the best data to use to inquire a nation's IQ for the following reasons;
- PISA test is essentially an IQ test. PISA scores and standard IQ test scores correlate at an astonishing level (0.94). Questions are not so curriculum based but students have to solve real world problems using things they learned in school. "Reading" does not involve literal reading, but understanding articles and texts. You can take a look at examples of PISA tests here: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/
- PISA test scores are easily converted into IQ numbers. A score of 500 is IQ 100 while a score of 435 is a score of 90.
- PISA uses a much higher sample size than most standard studies on IQ tests (5000 minimum)
- PISA students are selected randomly from the pool of all 15 year old students from each country, unlike with studies on classic IQ test which often use samples which don't represent the whole country
- Statistical variation of PISA scores for a particular country across years are very small, which suggests PISA "captures" the representative sample of a country's population unlike studies on standard IQ test, where scores vary up to 20 IQ points from study to study. In countries where there are only a few studies published it's very possible they won't "capture" a representative sample for the entire country. If you then average it out for multiple years like I did, it's even more statistically representative.
- PISA score map of Europe and the world has much less variety with neighboring culturally and genetically similar countries which suggests the numbers are accurate. Balkan Muslim countries and SE Asia are the only regions where there are sudden "drops".
These maps are based on all PISA data going back from 2000 - 2022. IMO scores from early 2000 are just as important when calculating final IQ of a country. People who took the test in 2000 are today in their late 30s and are very much alive and contribute to the country even more so than kids aged 16 who took the test last year.
These numbers include immigrants, I would make maps from non immigrant scores, but I only found them for math. Non immigrant scores for countries with large numbers of immigrants would undoubtedly score higher as OECD data itself shows immigrants in most Western countries depress the numbers, but they probably don't depress the numbers much. For example in Netherlands for 2022 only 14% of those tested were from immigrant background and the final score goes all the way back to 2000 when there were even less immigrants.
Regarding the colors; The world average IQ according to Lynn and Becker is around 85 so I chose scores higher than that to be green while scores lower to be red.
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