At Frontiers in Psychology, it seems that users on X are now part of the peer review process.

On January 4th, the paper “Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average,” was accepted to the journal. That same day, the abstract was published with the notice that the “final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.”

Soon thereafter, the paper went viral, quickly accruing over 54,000 views, wide discussion on X and Reddit, and coverage in popular media (including RCS). It garnered this attention for its intriguing yet simultaneously obvious finding: over the past 80 years, as a far greater proportion of North Americans attended college, the average IQ of college undergraduates dropped from around 120 to 102, just slightly above the average of 100.

As the authors, Bob Uttl, a psychologist and faculty member at Mount Royal University, and his students Victoria Violo and Lacey Gibson, noted, “The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.” College students no longer come solely from the ranks of the highly intelligent and privileged, they come from all corners of society. Uttl and his colleagues noted that this has implications. For example, academic standards and curricula might have to be adjusted. Moreover, employers can’t assume that applicants with university degrees are more capable or smarter than those without degrees.

A little over a month after Uttl, Violo, and Gibson’s paper was accepted and the abstract published, they were abruptly notified by email that it was rejected. They were apprised that Specialty Chief Editor Eddy Davelaar, a Professor of Psychology and Applied Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, overrode the three peer reviewers who approved the paper and even his own handling editor. His reasons were subsequently forwarded to Uttl and his colleagues.