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There is an interesting trend in test scores in exams (GCSE and A-level) in the UK: they are increasing, or so the trend in the grades would tend to show. This is known as grade inflation and affects other countries, too.

Why is this? I have heard several reasons. The first is that students are just generally getting smarter. The second reason I have heard is that exams are getting easier. To me (as a student), it personally seems like the exams are getting easier, although it is hard to judge. What independent research has been performed to determine if it is exams or students?

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Don't forget that the nature of the world has changed. No longer do people need to keep a lot of information stored up in their head when they have access to instantaneous resources from anywhere which can tell you these things. Is it a bad thing that ability is now based on intuition and expertise rather than remembering useless things? It frees up a lot of head space. – Chris Dennett May 11 '11 at 22:11
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@Chris I completely agree. One of the best examples is a programmer with internet access. There is no reason for the programmer to memorize thousands of different functions, algorithms, etc. when he/she can look them up with ease. Thinking ability is a far more important skill nowadays. – Puddingfox May 12 '11 at 4:14
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False dichotomy. The third alternative is that teachers (or rather, teaching methods) are getting better. Now, this is a known fact, and readily explained through the improvements in the research of didactics. Whether this alone explains the effect is of course another question. – Konrad Rudolph♦ May 12 '11 at 11:38
The Flynn effect would suggest that students are getting smarter (or at least smarter by the metrics being measured). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect – Andrew Grimm May 12 '11 at 13:06
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Actually there's many other options: students are putting more time into academics, students study more effectively. There is no reason to believe that the exams mentioned measure smartness. Does knowing which year Richard of York got killed mean you are smarter? I think not. – apoorv020 May 12 '11 at 16:47
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The idea that people are getting smarter in recent years is known as the Flynn Effect after James R. Flynn who promoted the idea.

It is more prominent on IQ tests which are standardised against the population average.

Wikipedia explains:

The only way to compare the difficulty of two versions of a test is to conduct a separate study in which the same subjects take both versions. Doing so confirms IQ gains over time. The average rate of increase seems to be about three IQ points per decade in the US on tests such as the WISC. The increasing raw scores appear on every major test, in every age range and in every modern industrialized country although not necessarily at the same rate as in the US using the WISC.

As well as giving an overview, the Wikipedia page discusses many of studies on the effect, possible causes (including better nutrition) and the theory that it may be slowing down recently.

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I note with interest the suggested causes, which include nutrition, "teaching for the test", television and computer games, infectious diseases and even less in-breeding! No-one seems to want to give teachers any credit for being better at their job at raising bright children than teachers were three generations ago. I wonder why that is not considered a factor. – Oddthinking♦ Jun 6 '11 at 11:28
Because the heritability estimate for intelligence is .50-.80 it's implausible for the whole Flynn effect (2 SDs in ten decades) to be accounted for by environmental influence (e.g. teachers). That's been discussed in the literature a lot too, but maybe this deserves its own question (it's research-level though). It's also not necessarily relevant to the question as teaching-to-the-test probably occurs to a smaller degree with IQ tests than with school tests (Increased output control in the US purportedly led to this). I might flesh this out if I have time, but feel free to beat me to it! – Ruben Jun 6 '11 at 18:45
Interesting, because I would have thought the genetic changes over 100 years would be negligible too. Does that leave population changes? – Oddthinking♦ Jun 6 '11 at 18:51
That's why they call it a paradox. I linked to an article in another question that does, to my mind, a good job of summing up the debate (and a much better one than Flynn's recent paper). He argues for heterosis which is genetic change that is plausible for 10 decades. Richard Lynn argues for prenatal nutrition (which would be confounded with genetics). Probably there is no single cause. But this is really something where I quickly run low on characters in the comment space :-) – Ruben Jun 6 '11 at 19:36
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An extra data point here – Benjol May 2 '12 at 12:34
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