Is it true that Ukraine is in last place among European countries in terms of IQ level?

At the beginning of January 2025, Russian media disseminated information about the low IQ of Ukrainian residents - according to this indicator, the country is allegedly significantly inferior to, for example, Russia and China. We checked the correctness of these data and their interpretation.

Media and Telegram channels, citing the rating of the International IQ Register, reported that Ukraine is in last place among European countries in terms of IQ. As evidence, a screenshot of the corresponding report of the above-mentioned organization was provided. In it, Ukraine is in 78th place globally, while Russia is in sixth place. China topped the ranking. Wrote about this Lenta.ru, "News", "Gazeta.ru", "News", "Russian newspaper", RT And "Moskovsky Komsomolets", as well as Telegram channels "Anatoly Shariy"(1.1 million views at the time of writing this analysis), "Live broadcast" (862 000), "Operation Z: military correspondents of the Russian spring"(572,000), "Pozdnyakov" (396,000) and "Two majors"(392,000).

Intelligence quotient (IQ) is a quantitative assessment of a person’s level of mental development. It is determined through special tests, and there is no single standard in the methodology for determining IQ. Typically, tests are developed Soso that their results are described by a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. In other words, in the range of 85–115 located slightly more than 2/3 of all results, a value of less than 70 is often qualified as mental retardation, and over 130 as genius.

Despite their popularity, IQ tests are often are exposed criticism from scientists approvingthat there is no single metric for determining the level of intelligence and these tests consider only one side of human thinking.

International IQ Test website (international-iq-test.com), positioning itself as the International IQ Registry exists. Anyone can take a test there, the results of which are entered into a global database. Every year on January 1, a summary is updated on the website. table for all countries whose representatives took the test. In the latest release, Ukraine actually ranks 78th, and Russia – sixth. There are a total of 126 countries on the list.

Numerous methodological shortcomings of the rating are striking. Firstly, it only includes the results of users who have passed the test on this site over the past year, which is why a country can dramatically change its position in the ranking. For example, in 2023 Austria settled down on the sixth line, and a year later - already on the 34th place, Israel a year earlier made a leap from 60th places on 11th, although it is unlikely that the average IQ level in the country can change so dramatically in such a short time. Secondly, the samples in different countries differ markedly: in some cases there are tens and even hundreds of thousands of people (more than 200,000 participants from China), in some cases there are several hundred (438 users from Armenia). However, the site is not among the most prestigious (as Mensa International) or mass (like IQTest.com) in their field, so these samples, by definition incomparable, also raise questions in the context of the randomness of the selection of participants. Besides, testing Raven's standard progressive matrices, which underlies the tasks on this resource, is just one of many techniques measurements of IQ, and it is not entirely correct to consider it an absolute indicator.

Another important disadvantage is that the number of attempts for each user is unlimited (which in itself makes any rating meaningless), and his country is not automatically determined by IP (you can specify any).

The authors of the site claim that they are struggling with the first problem when compiling the annual rating, but the effectiveness of these measures is questionable. In particular, the site provides examples of criteria that can be used to filter the results: IP address (can be dynamic or change when connecting via VPN), alias (you can take any), email address (can be changed) and payment information (this step can be bypassed altogether, the results are still entered).

So on international-iq-test.com there is an opportunity to cheat the results of any country. For example, at the beginning of January 2025, journalists from the Ukrainian publication Focus recorded mass passing of the test by users with the nicknames Porosenok and Epolih with the same extremely low result of 69. It is possible that this was an attempt at deliberate cheating - perhaps not entirely successful if at the end of the year most of these attempts are filtered out.

“Verified” studied statistics for other countries and also discovered anomalies. For example, apparently, the same user (nicknames are the same) from Armenia took the test two times in a row, but received significantly different results: 87 and 100 points.

At the beginning of 2025, after the news about the updated rating spread in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, a correspondence test was launched on the International IQ Test website. war between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian users who wanted to underestimate the results of hostile countries, and at the same time offend each other with offensive nicknames. There is no guarantee that similar actions have not been carried out before.

Thus, there is no reason to regard the table from the International IQ Test as an objective indicator of the average intelligence quotient for the country. This is hampered by very unequal and often limited samples, as well as the possibility of the same user taking the test multiple times, while choosing any country for which the result will be taken into account.

Cover photo: social networks

Mostly not true

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