What the exam asks
- Section I (Multiple Choice): Expect scenarios asking you to distinguish between achievement and aptitude tests, identify environmental explanations for the Flynn effect, or interpret graphs showing within-group versus between-group variation in IQ scores.
- Section II (AAQ and EBQ): Summarized studies on academic interventions frequently appear in the EBQ. You may need to use growth mindset, stereotype threat, or socioeconomic factors as the outside psychological concept in Parts B(ii) or C(ii) to explain how an intervention improves student achievement.
Core ideas
Societal factors and the Flynn effect
Intelligence test scores are standardized so the average score in a population is always . However, when researchers compare raw scores across generations on the same test, performance has steadily risen worldwide over the past century. This upward trend is called the Flynn effect.
Because human genetics cannot change drastically in a few decades, the Flynn effect demonstrates the powerful influence of environment on intelligence scores. Societal factors linked to rising IQ scores include:
- Higher socioeconomic status (SES) and reduced childhood poverty.
- Better nutrition and health care (such as lower rates of infectious disease).
- Increased access to formal education and more complex, visually rich environments.
Group variation, inequity, and historical misuse
When comparing demographic groups, IQ scores vary much more within groups than between groups. If you plot the score distributions of any two demographic groups, the two bell curves overlap almost entirely; knowing a person’s group membership tells you nothing reliable about their individual score.
Average differences between groups are driven by environmental inequities rather than innate ability:
- Systemic and socioeconomic factors: Poverty, discrimination, chronic stress, and unequal access to high-quality education depress average test scores in marginalized communities.
- Personal and sociocultural biases: Tests often reflect the language, values, and experiences of the culture that wrote them. Furthermore, stereotype threat—a self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype—can create anxiety and consume working memory during testing, artificially lowering performance.
- Historical misuse: Early intelligence pioneers often ignored cultural bias and environmental inequity, falsely claiming that score differences reflected genetic inferiority. Historically, intelligence tests were misused to justify eugenics and to restrict access to jobs, military ranks, educational institutions, and immigration to the United States (such as administering English-based or culturally specific IQ tests to newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island).