Exam hall at Hull Collegiate
School (Wikicommons – Robin S. Taylor). The GCSE exam is a poor measure of raw cognitive
ability. If some students get tutored and others do not, there will be more
environmental variance in IQ, and the exam results will say less about the
genetic potential for cognitive ability.
Chanda Chisala has written more
about cognitive ability in sub-Saharan Africa. His argument is straightforward:
[…] if it is true that on
average black Africans in Africa score extremely low on scholastic/intelligence
tests because they grow up with much less educational and other modern cultural
resources (as Flynn would agree), then they should perform "extremely
well" (by comparison) in those "g-loaded" cognitive contests
that do not require too much of such quality cultural exposure (as Jensen would
agree). (Chisala 2021)
Chanda argues that raw
cognitive ability is better measured in Africa by a Scrabble championship than by
an IQ test, since most Africans lack "access to well-trained teachers, big
libraries, computers or even TVs" (Chisala 2021). Africans are good at
Scrabble:
Nigeria happens to be the
world's top performing nation in English Scrabble, while francophone African
countries are also the most dominant in French Scrabble, despite the fact that
the top players in Western countries are super-high-IQ nerds with visibly
exceptional mathematical talents (Chisala 2021)
Correlation isn't causation.
Is a high IQ needed to do well at Scrabble? Not according to this study:
Forty tournament-rated
SCRABBLE players (20 elite, 20 average) and 40 unrated novice players completed
a battery of domain-representative laboratory tasks and standardized verbal
ability tests. The analyses revealed that elite- and average-level rated
players only significantly differed from each other on tasks representative of
SCRABBLE performance. Furthermore, domain-relevant practice mediated the
effects of SCRABBLE tournament ratings on representative task performance,
suggesting that SCRABBLE players can acquire some of the knowledge necessary
for success at the highest levels of competition by engaging in activities
deliberately designed to maximize adaptation to SCRABBLE-specific task
constraints. (Tuffiash, Roring, and Ericsson 2007)
Success at Scrabble seems to
be due largely to practice and is thus a poor measure of raw cognitive ability.
A curious detail: Nigeria's top
performers come overwhelmingly from one part of the country: the Niger Delta,
which is home to the Igbo and related tribes. Since the peoples of the Niger Delta
used to dominate trade between the coast and the interior, and since trade
selects for cognitive ability, mean IQ should be higher in those populations
that have long practiced it, like the Igbo (Frost 2015).
Young Nigerians in the UK - Academic achievement on the GCSE
Although many African
immigrants do poorly in British schools, some actually do well. A study of six
secondary schools in inner London found that results on the General Certificate
of Secondary Education (GCSE) were higher for African students who spoke Igbo,
Yoruba, Luganda, and Ga than for White British students who spoke only English (Demie
2013, p. 9). Chanda sees the GCSE as a proxy for IQ and argues that IQ differences
between African immigrants and White British must be highly malleable:
Africans speaking Luganda and
Krio did better than the Chinese students in 2011. The igbo were even more
impressive given their much bigger numbers (and their consistently high performance
over the years, gaining a 100 percent pass rate in 2009!). The superior Igbo
achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before
the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on "case
study" model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of
specified Igbo performance (recorded as Ibo in the table below) and it confirms
that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C
GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below
British whites. (Chanda 2015)
Igbo students stood out as
high achievers on the GCSE, as did Yoruba students to a lesser extent. In both
groups, however, the mean results were highly variable from one year to the
next:
2009: Igbo - 100%, Yoruba -
39%
2010: Igbo - 80%, Yoruba - 68%
2011: Igbo - 76%, Yoruba - 75%
(Demie 2013, p. 9)
Chanda attributes this
variability to statistical noise caused by small sample size. If so, there
should be an inverse correlation between sample size and variability. GCSE
scores should be more variable for smaller groups than for larger ones. Yet the
reverse seems to be true for the years 2009 to 2011:
Yoruba: 90 students / gain of
36 percentage points
Somali: 53 students / gain of
13 percentage points
Twi-Fante: 37 students / loss
of 3 percentage points
Igbo: 16 students / loss of 24
percentage points
Krio: 12 students / gain of 4
percentage points
Tigrinya: 12 students / loss
of 8 percentage points
Lingala: 12 students / loss of
5 percentage points
Ga: 8 students / gain of 9
percentage points
Swahili: 8 students / gain of
10 percentage points
(Demie 2013, pp. 7, 9)
The two largest gains were
made by the two largest groups: the Yoruba and the Somali. If the differences
between 2009 and 2011 are statistical noise, why are the largest ones associated
with the largest groups? Shouldn't we see the reverse? Shouldn't the smallest
groups show the most variability?
Something seems to be causing
those impressive GCSE gains. Since the students are not the same from one year
to the next, and since the gains differ considerably from one ethnic community
to another, the "something" must be the community itself. Over time,
the Yoruba community became better at assisting its students, and this kind of assistance
was available only in larger communities like the Yoruba.
The most obvious forms of
assistance are tutoring and coaching. Such assistance is mentioned by parents in
interviews for the above study:
Parent A: Father of daughter
in Year 9. Generally supportive of the school which was not his first choice
but is supplementing his daughter's education with a home tutor. He also calls
on his extended family, his oldest son who is a graduate is also expected to
help. (Demie 2013, p. 14)
Although tutoring and coaching
are perfectly legitimate, they invalidate the GCSE as a means to measure IQ,
particularly its genetic component. If some students get tutored and others do
not, there will be more environmental variance in IQ, and the exam results will
say less about the genetic potential for cognitive ability. Therefore, GCSE results
tell us what we already know: if you get tutored and coached before an exam,
you'll do better.
Are tutoring and coaching the
only forms of community assistance? There is another one: impersonation. In
other words, the parents hire a smart student from their community to take the
exam in their child's place. This strategy is feasible only if the community
has enough individuals who are (1) intelligent and (2) similar in age and
appearance to the student in question. Such individuals are lacking in a small
community, as are the middlemen who can refer an anxious parent to a suitable
source of assistance.
How common is this strategy?
Adebayo (2013) studied cheating behavior among Nigerian university students and
British university students. He found that impersonation services were used or provided
by 20% of the former and 1% of the latter. In general, cheating took non-collaborative
forms among British students and collaborative forms among Nigerian students:
These include behaviours like
writing somebody's coursework, colluding with others to communicate answers to
one another, over marking one another's course work etc. This is quite
different from plagiarism and non-collaborative cheating characteristic of the
British sample reported by Newstead et al (1996). Reasons for these differences
may be attributable to differences in population, differences in cultural ethnic,
differences in emphasis placed on examination as part of educational assessment
(Adebayo 2013, p. 146)
Adebayo (2013, p. 148) found
high rates of collaborative cheating among Nigerian students:
Permitting own coursework to
be copied - 72.6%
Copying another student's
coursework with consent - 47.3%
Collaborative generous marking
of coursework - 64.6%
Submitting joint work as an
individual's - 49.3%
Doing another student's
coursework for them - 77.3%
Collusion with another student
to communicate answers - 83%
We live in a world that has
low-trust and high-trust societies. In a high-trust society, like the UK,
cheating is considered shameful and disreputable, regardless of whom you cheat.
In a low-trust society, like Nigeria, cheating is wrong only when you do it to
friends and relatives.
What happens when individuals
from a low-trust society migrate to a high-trust one? If they come in
sufficient numbers, their opportunities for collaborative cheating are greatly
increased. Imagine you're supervising an exam in an English school, and you
suspect an African student is filling in for another. He shows you his school
card and another piece of ID. Both are correct. So what do you do now? Do you really
want to make a fuss and risk being accused of racial profiling? No you don't.
Future research
The GCSE study by Demie (2013)
leaves much to be desired. It does not provides the number of students who had
to retake that exam (which must be a large number); nor does it provide a
breakdown of the number of students taking it per year.
In any case, the GCSE is a
poor substitute for an IQ test. Even if we exclude cheating, the results are
distorted by legitimate activities like tutoring and coaching. The latter are
more available to some students than to others. Consequently, GCSE results tell
us nothing about differences in raw cognitive ability, either between
individuals or between communities.
Chanda promises to write an
article that will rule out cheating as an explanation for Nigerian success on
the GCSE. Again, the issue isn't just cheating. It's any assistance that goes
to some students and not to others. If you want to measure raw cognitive
ability, you need a level playing field. In particular, you need a test that
does not offer high achievers the lure of personal gain, which may push
test-takers to do well by hook or by crook. In the UK, an African with good GCSE
results has access to a wide range of good-paying jobs, in large part because
of "diversity quotas" of one sort or another.
This motive comes out in
interviews with the parents of African students:
● 'Without an education you
cannot earn a decent salary, without qualifications you cannot get a good job.
The best thing is to push your children as hard as you can.'
● 'Being a Black woman if you
don't have education in this country, what job will you have to do, clean
people's toilets?' (Demie 2013, p. 13)
This subject should definitely
be a research priority. We need IQ data on Nigerians, and not inadequate
substitutes like GCSE scores. We also need data on alleles associated with
educational attainment (i.e., polygenic scores). Furthermore, we need data on
each of Nigeria's ethnic groups, particularly the Igbo. It's hard to fake
intelligence in the real world, and the Igbo have a long history of doing
better at business and other endeavors. Unfortunately, intelligent people are
also better at cheating, so there is some confounding between real intelligence
and the fake kind.
References
Adebayo, S.O. (2011). Common
Cheating Behaviour among Nigerian University Students: A Case Study of
University of Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria. World
Journal of Education 1(1): 144-149.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1159043.pdf
Chisala, C. (2015). The IQ Gap
Is No Longer a Black and White Issue. The
Unz Review, June 25
https://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/
Chisala, C. (2020). Nigerians,
Jews and Scrabble: An Update on the IQ Debate. The Unz Review, February 27
https://www.unz.com/article/nigerians-jews-and-scrabble-an-update-on-the-iq-debate/#comment-4520966
Demie, F. (2013). Raising Achievement of Black African Pupils.
Good Practice in Schools. London: Lambeth Research and Statistics Unit,
Lambeth Council.
https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/rsu/sites/www.lambeth.gov.uk.rsu/files/Raising_the_Achievement_of_Black_African_Pupils-Good_Practice_in_Schools_2013.pdf
Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of
West Africa. The Unz Review, July 4
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-jews-of-west-africa/
Tuffiash, M., R.W. Roring, and
K.A. Ericsson. (2007). Expert performance in SCRABBLE: Implications for the
study of the structure and acquisition of complex skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(3), 124-134. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-898X.13.3.124
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