Interestingly, the scores have been in free fall since the pandemic started and cannot be explained by learning loss from lockdowns as the effects are observed even after in school learning has resumed.
One possible explanation is cognitive loss due to covid infections:
14 points
IQ measurement has lots of well known problems, but it does provide a baseline. If people are having more difficulty doing the same kind of reasoning before and after covid, that’s not a good sign. Meanwhile, the performance is out of students who took the test, it’s not measuring whether more or less people took it. I guess we’ll see if this is also reflected in SAT tests.
