Intelligence Quotient

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‘Intelligence’ is a difficult concept to define as it’s meaning may vary across cultures and throughout the course of history. In 1995, the American Psychological Association defined intelligence as the capacity “to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought”. A misconception that appears to have developed from the more traditional, or out-dated perception of intelligence is that the concept can be defined based on the scope of one’s knowledge and their ability to retain information (Lynn, 2006). Today, intelligence, or good intellectual functioning, can be determined by abstract thinking; reasoning, understanding,…show more content…
One of the most prominent measures of intelligence is the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). The IQ, initially derived by William Stern, was a measure that calculated an individual’s intelligence by dividing their mental age by their chronological age. However, this simple method was not an accurate measure of an individual’s intellectual functioning for the reason that once adulthood has been reached, intelligence tends not to increase with chronological age and can in fact begin to decrease (Roth, 1990). David Wechsler introduced a new measure of IQ, whereby large sample groups are drawn from each age group of the population. The sample groups participate in an intelligence test that quantifies each individual’s correct answers on that test. The value of this measurement of IQ is that firstly, an individual’s scores can be compared with that of the mean scores of that age group of the population. Secondly, it allows for relativity (Roth, 1990). Existing research on the topic of intelligence and IQ of university students primarily centers on the differences found amongst geographical location, race, and gender. Existing research that investigated the IQ scores of university students more often than not included a comparison of race and gender, whilst differences in geographic location has not been touched on as…show more content…
The book includes samples of populations across the globe and discusses the IQ findings of university students within these populations (Lynn, 2006). Data in Lynn’s book indicates that the mean IQ of university students in Britain (109) is higher than that of the students in Australia (106), New Zealand (106), Netherlands (105), Poland (103), South Africa (103), USA (103), and Romania (101), which had the lowest relative IQ scores (Lynn, 2006). Richard Lynn (2006) further compares sample groups of university students from populations in South Asia and North Africa that shows that IQ scores were highest in Turkey (101) compared to the population groups of Iran (90), India (88), and Egypt (85). Lynn maintains that there is a difference between the IQ scores of black and white university students – the latter is argued to have higher IQ scores. Data in support of this argument is derived from a sample group for the South African population that consisted of black and white participants from the University of Witswatersand and the Rand Afrikaans University. In this sample group, the black participants represented an IQ score of 83. In comparison, the white students represented an IQ score of 103, thus totaling an IQ gap of 20 (Lynn,
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