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Clever teenagers of today are not as bright as kids in the class of 1976, according to researchers. Skip related content

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Class of 76 'cleverer' than kids of today

The intellect of even the brainiest 14-year-olds has deteriorated dramatically over the decades despite an increase in the number of pupils achieving top grades in exams.

Their cognitive abilities are level with those of 12-year-olds in 1976, the study found.

Researchers at King's College London compared the mental agility of 800 bright 13 and 14-year-olds with similar tests carried out some three decades ago.

A rise in "home-related" speech problems, shown by children who are not encouraged by their parents to speak from an early age, is fuelling the increase, according to the Tory MP John Bercow, who has carried out a review for the government.

Poor reading and writing skills among graduates are a concern for half of the UK's top employers, a survey suggests.

The Association of Graduate Recruiters found 56% of the 200 firms surveyed had concerns about a lack of "hard skills" like writing, literacy and leadership.

The survey found employers were also less likely to trust degree grades as "gold standards" for recruitment.

UK IT students are hiring coders in India to complete their coursework for as little as £5 a go.

A-level and university pupils are logging onto computer coding websites and farming out their work to foreign IT graduates.

Academics at Birmingham City University have detected 1,000 students cheating worldwide since they began monitoring the websites in 2004.

School mathematics exams in England have become easier, shallower and less demanding, according to a think tank.

Analysis of public maths exam papers taken by 16-year-olds between 1951 and 2006 shows standards have declined markedly, the report for Reform argues.

This means more pupils have left school ill-prepared for the workplace and a generation of mathematicians has been lost to the nation's economy, it adds.

The government insists maths exam standards are very closely monitored.
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In today's Britain it is acceptable to say that you can't do maths Elizabeth Truss Reform

The Reform report assesses how maths exam papers changed over time in terms of their content, difficulty, style and pass standard.

It concludes that between 1951, when O-levels were introduced, and 1970, standards remained constant with a strong focus on algebra, arithmetic and geometry.

A simplification trend began in the 1980s with an attempt to show mathematics in context, but the syllabus remained comparable to that of earlier years.

WHEN IT COMES to the huge and persistent gender gap in science and technology jobs, the finger of blame has pointed in many directions: sexist companies, boy-friendly science and math classes, differences in aptitude.

Women make up almost half of today's workforce, yet hold just a fraction of the jobs in certain high-earning, high-qualification fields. They constitute 20 percent of the nation's engineers, fewer than one-third of chemists, and only about a quarter of computer and math professionals.

Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap. It has stayed in the media spotlight thanks in part to the high-profile misstep of then-Harvard president Larry Summers, whose loose comment at a Harvard conference on the topic in 2005 ultimately cost him his job.

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

”It's very frustrating, and even as I said, for the students who come in here who say: ‘Wait a minute, you're asking me to do all this. I don't know how to do this. I don't have enough time to do this. I'm not used to doing this. I don't want to do it" said Dr. Rodriguez.

Dr. Rodriguez believes high school tests reward students for minimal knowledge, which won’t work in college where professors expect you to know how to read and comprehend complex sentences. She says college professors don’t grade you on whether you try, but what’s right.

There are no points for effort, like some students got away with in high school.

”We have watered down too much material, and a lot of teachers know that," said Dr. Rodriguez.

The students will tell you themselves what the focus was in high school. And then there's math. There are some students in these remedial courses who cannot add, subtract, or do basic multiplication. And one professor says calculators are a big problem.

In particular, the MPs on the Commons innovation, universities, science and skills committee criticised the "peer review" process by which projects were assessed and prioritised.

They said they had found "weaknesses" in the system and had to conclude that it was "inadequate".

This had been compounded by a series of internal reviews of scientific projects commissioned by the chief executive but never shared with the scientific community.

"We are at a loss to understand how Professor Mason could think that secretive reviews would have anything other than a divisive effect on the community and undermine confidence in any of his future decisions."