Apparently, Filipinos Have Below-Average I.Q., According to New Report

Not exactly the kind of news anybody wants to wake up to and read. Not a Pinoy pride moment either. But human intelligence can be a game of quotients, and metrics certainly don't lie, even if the truth leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. Apparently, World Population Review data suggests that Filipinos rank 111th worldwide in terms of our intelligence quotient (IQ) score. This effectively classifies us as, regrettably, below average.

Based in Walnut, California, the World Population Review is an independent organization that gathers data across 200 nations and has no political affiliations. Its figures suggest that the Philippines has an average IQ score of 81.64 for 2023, which puts us on the outside looking in compared to some of our other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) counterparts.

The Philippines ranks in the lower half for IQ in the Southeast Asia region. We are placed right there with Malaysia, Brunei, Laos, and Indonesia. Singapore, which ranks third worldwide, clocks in at first place followed by Cambodia and Myanmar, two countries that cracked the top 100.

As it stands, Japan has the highest recorded IQ by country in 2023 at 106.48. Taiwan and Singapore, with scores of 106.47 and 105.89, ranked second and third, respectively.

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According to the group, IQ scores reflect the quality of education and resources available to people in their local geographic region. This means that countries that have worse or less developed educational resources are put at an automatic disadvantage.

In the Philippines' case, a looming educational crisis has affected our children. Roughly nine out of 10 Filipino children aged 10 and below have trouble reading and writing simple text these days, according to the World Bank's latest statistics on learning poverty in 2021.

But hey, the good news is that IQ isn't really all that. We could take solace in the fact that these aren't fixed IQ scores. We also have our adversity and emotional intelligence quotients to cling to, although the data there is pretty scarce. Moreover, IQ is considered more a good measure of a person's reasoning ability than the actual definition of our intellectual worth. Who needs logic anyway?