Here is the download link: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/pisa-2015-results-volume-i_9789264266490-en

First Impressions

(1) China B-S-J-G (Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong) has a PISA-equivalent national IQ of 102. This is actually worse than the IQ=103 leaked 2009 results based on 12 provinces, which I posted about a few years ago. Even more curiously, Beijing, Shanghai, and Jiangsu all constitute three of the top five Chinese provinces based on other IQ tests (original), with Guangdong in 7th place; the provinces China uses for PISA are still evidently selected for their likelihood of doing very well. Furthermore, coverage was an unimpressive 64% of the population.

UPDATE: A better source cited by commenter Bobbi based on Raven tests shows Guangdong getting 2 IQ points less than the Chinese average, so this would partially cancel out the inclusion of three otherwise cognitive elite provinces.

(2) Vietnam gets a national IQ of 100, although at 49% based on even smaller coverage than China’s. This, too, was a decline from PISA 2012, when they got around 102. Korea also dropped substantially from 106 in 2012 to 103 this round. All in all – a bad beat for “Team East Asia.”

(3) Russia improved significantly, which went from 96 in 2009 to 97 in 2012 and 99 this year – and this is with 95% coverage. This is likely because the generation that grew up in the 1990s was afflicted by the consequences of the Soviet collapse and shock therapy, which included a near halving of meat consumption and an alcoholism epidemic (education spending also fell, but performance on these tests seems to be pretty inelastic to this factor). But the 2015 PISA cohort was born around 2000, when living standards began to recover along with nutritional diversity and all kinds of other biodemographic indicators. Note that I did expect this to happen: “… in the next decade I expect the Flynn Effect to kick off in Russia’s favor, raising its average IQ levels to their theoretical peak of 100 by the 2020’s.”

(4) Poland does not repeat its anomalously good IQ=103 results from 2012, converging down to a still respectable 101.

(5) The US modestly improves to 98.

(6) A major improvement for Argentina, which raised its IQ to 95 by an amazing 10 IQ points. This improvement is so big that questions have to be asked as to how exactly they managed it. It wasn’t because they dropped their commendable habit, first noticed by Steve Sailer, of rounding up their dimmest 15 year olds to take the PISA tests (unlike Mexico, or Vietnam); to the contrary, they continued going well beyond the call of duty, achieving 104% coverage – the highest of any country.

UPDATE: From Sailer’s thread, Gaucho de la Pampa comments:

1) Argentina no longer means Argentina, it’s just the city of Buenos Aires (CABA – Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires) . The results for the rest of the country were invalidated because of cheating: http://www.clarin.com/sociedad/Pruebas-PISA-Argentina-principal-educativa_0_1700229967.html 2) It’s not about rounding up missing schoolchildren, if that many went missing from taking the test the results would be annulled as they were in Argentina, rather in some countries vast numbers of 15 year olds don’t attend school and PISA is a test designed for those attending school. 3) The glass half full interpretation is that as Mexico’s share of 15 year olds that attend school has increased its scores have remained roughly static (though obviously crappy)

LOL, well that explains everything. Good job Argentina!

(7) At the very bottom of the list, the Dominican Republic has a PISA-equivalent IQ of 76, which is roughly equivalent to that of India (which, incidentally, dropped out of PISA 2015, possibly on account of doing so badly in the last assessment). Lynn estimates it at 82. According to an analysis by Jason Malloy, Cuba gets an average of 90 on Raven’s tests, and 105-109 (!) from a couple of UNESCO comparative regional tests. So it’s probably safe to say that Cuba is cognitively better off than the Dominican Republic, which makes its decline from double its income level in the 1950s to 2/3 of it today all the more attributable to central planning.