Comment by tptacek
1 year ago
Yes, that is a statistic that does not in fact exist. It may exist in theory, but there is no mechanism in place anywhere to collect it, and there never has been.
Americans should know this intuitively by dint of most of us never having been "officially" IQ tested. Somehow, the notion of reliable national IQ statistics persists.
I was IQ tested by my school in Massachusetts more than once in the 1960s.
Ok? Almost nobody is.
Whether anybody in the US is is irrelevant to whether data exists or used to exist from previous decades that was used to get an estimate of the average IQ of the US at that time in the past.
I was tested by the public school system of the second-largest city in Massachusetts and have no reason to believe that my experience was atypical.
About the same time as I was being tested, in Diana v. State Board of Education (1970) a court ruled that a school could not place students in a class for mild mental retardation because of a low score on the Stanford Benet IQ test, which of course implies that she was tested by her school.
There were other lawsuits like this in other US states.
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