Performance on Raven's matrices by African and White University students in South Africa

Untimed Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) were administered to 309 17- to 23-year-old students at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg, South Africa (173 Africans, 136 Whites; 205 women, 104 men). African students solved an average of 44 of the 60 problems whereas White students solved an average of 54 of the problems (p<0.001). By the standards of the 1993 US normative sample, the African university students scored at the 14th percentile and the White university students scored at the 61st percentile (IQ equivalents of 84 and 104, respectively). The African-White differences were found to be greater on those items of the SPM with the highest item-total correlations, indicating a difference in g, or the general factor of intelligence. A small sex difference favoring males was found in both the African and the White samples, but unrelated to g.