[JeremyStinson]

Given that there's known neurological complications from Covid infection, it's possible it's a contributing factor to the drop in test scores.

[wumeow]

Just eyeballing the tables[0][1], that certainly seems plausible.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/12/do-adults-have-...

[giantg2]

You'd have to be on disability to not understand the sort of questions like this. Those disability numbers, especially from covid, should be available.

“Crackers seem soft when their moisture level reaches about 9 percent.” The sample “low difficulty” question asks, “At what moisture level do crackers become soft?”

[lesuorac]

Crackers also seem soft when their moisture level reaches about 5 percent.

What moisture level do crackers become soft?

I'm sorry, 5 percent isn't the correct answer; they actually get soft earlier than then.

This seems like one of those questions like "what's the difference between an abstract class and an interface in Java" where you're looking what the expected answer is as opposed to the actual answer. (w.r.t. Java; the answer they're looking for is that you can define a default method in an abstract class. It doesn't matter how long ago you could do that in an interface ...)

[dwaltrip]

Ok so why did the scores change?

[015a]

COVID is global, obviously. The article specifically calls out Americans' scores dropping.

[jph00]

The article also pointed out that similar things are apparent in many other countries. Finland was highlighted as a place that avoided the trend -- a country that also had relatively low covid impact compared to the US.

[cl42]

I wonder about this regularly and think back to discussions on this topic back in 2020-2021. Are there more recent studies or research on this topic you'd recommend?