Something you may not know about the IQ test.
Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact he designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or "mental worth." In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created "does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured."
Nor did he ever intend it so suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. "Some recent thinkers," he said "[have affirmed] that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased.
In1916, Lewis Terman of Stanford University published a revision of Binet's IQ test. Known as the Stanford-Binet test, it is the basis of the modern IQ test. Terman had an extreme view of human capacity. He wrote: "Among laboring me and servant girls there are thousands like them feebleminded. They are the world's 'hewers of wood and drawers of water.' And yet, as far as intelligence is concerned, the tests have told the truth . . . No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable voters in the true sense of the word."
Terman was active in the eugenics movement which sought to weed out entire sectors of the population by arguing that such traits as criminality and pauperism were hereditary, and that it was possible to identify these traits through intelligence testing. The movement also claimed that entire ethnic groups, including southern Europeans, Jews, Africans, and Latinos fell into such categories. Terman wrote: "The fact that one meets this type with such frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and Negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods."
"Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view, they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding."
The movement succeeded in lobbying for involuntary sterilization laws in thirty states. This meant the state could neuter people who fell below particular IQ without their having a say in the matter. Each state repealed their law.
IQ tests were even a matter of life and death. A criminal who commits a capital offense is not subject to the death penalty if his IQ is below seventy. However, IQ scores regularly rise over the course of a generation, (by as much as twenty-five points), causing the scale to be reset every fifteen or twenty years to maintain a mean score of one hundred. Therefore someone who commits a capital offense may be more likely to be put to death at the beginning of the cycle that at the end. That gives the IQ test a lot of responsibility.
People can also improve their scores through study and practice. In one case a death row inmate who at that point had spent ten years in jail on a life sentence. During his incarceration, he took a series of course. When retested, his IQ had risen more than ten points---suddenly making him eligible for execution.
While most of us will never be in a situation where we are sterilized or given a lethal injection the question is what are these numbers and what do they truly say about our intelligence?
The answer is that the numbers largely indicate a person's ability to perform on a test of certain sorts of mathematical and verbal reasoning. They measure some types of intelligence, not the whole of intelligence. And, as noted above, the baseline keeps shifting to accommodate improvements in the population as a whole over time.
John
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Gatlinburg, TN
Email: jrjenki@gmail.com
Website: http://www.greenbriersolutions.com
Blog: http://littlepigeon.blogspot.com/
"Hail to the Chief" was written for James Madison because he was so short that no one ever noticed when he entered the room.
