Image by Pexels from Pixabay
I’ve been thinking lately about the pervasive decline in reading, a phenomenon I noticed as a college prof over many years of teaching, and which now seems to have become even more prevalent. These reflections were spurred by two films which I’ve recently re-watched, the rather gruesome three-part Hannibal series starring the inimitable Anthony Hopkins, and the ever-delightful six-episode
Oliver’s Travels featuring a charming performance from Alan Bates.
What struck me about the Hannibal trilogy was the surname Lecter, a homonym for the word “lector” from the Latin for “reader,” and which gives us the common word “lecture.” Hannibal the Cannibal is a reader of sorts, a rather voracious one. A forensic psychotherapist by profession, he is deeply educated, can lecture on Renaissance art and history and recite Dante in the original, loves and understands music, knows precisely how to detect life histories from a modicum of cues and de
Nothing, it seems, had changed.
Those facts, however, disguise a surprising truth.
IQ tests are based on scaled scores. That is: the student’s
raw test score is
translated into an IQ score according to a formula. And here’s the key part that formula is readjusted every ten years.
So: the reason that average IQ scores
haven’t changed is that
the formula
has changed to keep the average at 100. A lot. Raw scores on the underlying test have gone considerably over the history over the test.
If our grandparents’ raw scores were translated according to today’s formula, their average would be about 70. If our scores were translated according to our grandparents’ formula, the average would be about 130.