Mali’s IQ is strange.
Race and IQ is a tired discussion, I’m aware, but this result bothers me a little.
Mali is a landlocked, arid country that is currently failing to curtail the rise of violent Islamic terrorism. They are an extremely poor country even by Sahel Africa standards 🇲🇱. A google search will bring about violent videos. There is no reason to expect that the Malian would do well in an IQ test
Lynn noted down their IQ as 65 because of the results of 206 Malian children, aged 6 to 14 attending a private French-language school in Bamako, when they attempted the Ravens Progressive Matrices (RPM). They performed poorly, with only 1% of them scoring above 84. This is about what I expected.
But in that same study the researchers found that those same children scored above the British average (normed at 100, they scored 106) on a standardized math test, the Woodcock-Johnson. Furthermore, they performed average to well above average on adaptive functioning measures including communication and socialization.
The researchers stressed that while the RPM score was genuinely very low, it didn’t appear to correspond to any deficits in mathematical understanding or real-world functioning. Either the RPM is culturally loaded against Malian children, the RPM is a poor cross-cultural predictor of cognitive functioning, or Malian kids in particular simply don’t need to have a high IQ to function.
I can’t really find much statistics about how Malian refugees or immigrants perform in France proper when it comes to average income, crime, grades etc.