July 23, 2015

expert reaction to genetics and GCSE achievement

Genes are thought to play a significant role in general educational achievement, although it is unclear how this might apply to individual academic subjects. A team of researchers has now investigated this by using the GCSE results of pairs of both identical and non-identical twins, and report that many academic subjects are influenced by the same genes, even after accounting for general intelligence.

Prof. Darren Griffin, Professor of Genetics, School of Biosciences, University of Kent, said:

“It comes as no surprise that there should be a heritable component to exam success.  The approach used in this study is a standard one demonstrating that monozygotic (identical) twins’ GCSE marks correlate significantly more closely than dizygotic (fraternal) twins.

What we need to be careful of however is leaping to the assumption that this means that people are predisposed to do more or less well in their school exams.  Genetics is the science of inheritance, not pre-determinism, and there is no substitute for hard work and application.”

Prof. John Hardy, Professor of Neuroscience, UCL, said:

“Twin studies are a mainstay of behavioural genetics, but they make a simple assumption that is unlikely to be true: that is that we treat identical twins the same as we treat non-identical twins (who look much more different from each other).

“These results are interesting, therefore, but by no means definitive and it would be unwise to make educational decisions based on these data.”

Prof. Timothy Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, King’s College London, said:

“Studies showing exam achievements (like IQ) have a strong genetic influence are not new. Unfortunately they are usually over-interpreted as presenting falsely a notion of fixed destiny.”

‘Pleiotropy across academic subjects at the end of compulsory education’ by Rimfeld et al. published in Scientific Reports on Thursday 23^rd July. 

Declared interests

Prof. Griffin and Prof. Hardy: None declared

Prof. Spector: None received