Gen Z has managed something no modern generation pulled off before. After more than a century of steady academic gains, test scores finally went the other direction. For the first time ever, a new generation is officially dumber than the previous one.
The data comes from neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, who has spent years reviewing standardized testing results across age groups. “They’re the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized academic tests than the one before it,” Horvath told the New York Post. The declines cut across attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, and general IQ. That’s not just one weak spot. That’s the whole darn dashboard blinking at once.
Horvath took the same message to Capitol Hill during a 2026 Senate hearing on screen time and children. His framing skipped the generational dunking and focused on exposure. “More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,” he told lawmakers. Human learning, he argued, depends on sustained attention and interaction with other people. Endless feeds and condensed content don’t offer either.
University “educator” here. There is a dramatic increase in students who are lacking in critical thinking, especially after COVID. I’m not referring to people who just bomb tests, but a complete lack of motivation/ability to do basic things without someone handholding them through the entire process.
We’re seeing students completely refuse to solve basic equations X = Y + Z for advanced upper div computer science courses, or have trouble setting up a basic C/C++ template with very a detailed Readme guiding people through the whole process. We’re also seeing students zone out and blue screen when being guided through a homework question. (“Here’s the equation, where are the numbers in this question description, what happens if you change XYZ”. This is all being done in bite sized chunks). A lot of people only respond to traditional lecturing in a big hall and cannot/will not respond to any questions/reading materials. In these cases, I believe their standardized testing scores reflect their knowledge level accurately.
This isn’t to say there aren’t good students. If you look at the overall distribution, there’s still a decent amount of good/smart students. It’s just that test results are no longer showing a bell curve these days. Usually, it’s a bell curve overlapped with a large tail that can consist up to 20-30% of a class.