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Comment by strebler | Hacker News Reader

I had the same initial reaction to the graph, but she seems to be using the graph to show that reality may be at odds with the enrollment numbers. Data from 1932 does seem quite out of place in an article addressing "recent trends".

She goes on to suggest that the gifted programs are more targeted to girls - things like verbal-oriented tests and needing to "sit still" for periods of time.

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Yeah. It would be interesting to know if intelligence distributions remain constant from generation to generation.

The 1932 data described in the article is important because it covered nearly the entire population of a country for a particular age group -- uneven data collection could not have skewed the results. Uneven data collection is the great enemy of psychological public policy, since politicians can so conveniently project their dispute onto the people that were not sampled. The 1932 Scotland data slams that door shut.

Other testing programs since then have showed a slow, steady rise in the average IQ, called the Flynn effect. However the relative shapes of the male and female histograms have been quite constant. (Ditto for the relative shapes of the racial curves.)

Ditto for the relative shapes of the racial curves.

There has been some convergence, that is lessening of a gap, among race and ethnicity groups in the United States as a matter of group averages.

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