Psychology
March 7,1997
The task of trying to quantify a person's
intelligence has been a goal of
psychologists
since before the beginning of this century.
The Binet-Simon scales were
first proposed in
1905 in Paris, France and various sorts of tests have been evolving ever
since. One of the important questions that always
comes up regarding these tools is what
are the tests
really measuring? Are they measuring a person's
intelligence? Their ability
to perform well
on standardized tests? Or just some
arbitrary quantity of the person's IQ?
When examining
the situations around which these tests are given and the content of the
tests themselves,
it becomes apparent that however useful the tests may be for
standardizing a
group's intellectual ability, they are not a good indicator of intelligence.
To issue a truly standardized test, the testing
environment should be the same for
everyone
involved. If anything has been learned
from the psychology of perception, it is
clear that a
person's environment has a
great deal to do
with their cognitive abilities. Is the
light
flickering? Is the paint on the walls an unsettling
shade? Is the temperature too hot or too
cold? Is the chair uncomfortable? Or in the worst case, do they have an illness
that day?
To test a
person's mind, it is necessary to utilize their body in the process. If everyone's
body is placed in
different conditions during the testing, how is it
expected to get
standardized results across all the subjects?
Because of this assumption
that everyone
will perform equally independent of their environment, intelligence test
scores are skewed
and cannot be viewed as standardized, and definitely not as an example
of a person's
intelligence.
It is obvious that a person's intelligence
stems from a variety of traits. A few of
these that are
often tested are reading comprehension, vocabulary, and spatial relations.
But this is not
all that goes into it. What about
physical intelligence, conversational
intelligence,
social intel-ligence, survival intelligence, and the slew of others that
go into everyday
life? Why are these important traits not
figured into intelligence tests?
Granted, normal
standardized tests certainly get predictable results where academics are
concerned, but
they should not be con-sidered good indicators of general intelligence
because of the
glaring omissions they make in the testing process. To really gauge a
person's
intelligence, it would be necessary to put them through a rigorous set of
real-life
trials and
document their performance. Otherwise
the standardized IQ tests of today are
testing an
extremely limited quality of a person's character that can hardly be referred
to
as intelligence.
For the sake of brevity, I will quickly mention
a few other common criticisms of
modern IQ
tests. They have no way to compensate
for cultural differences. People use
different methods
to solve problems. People's reading
strategies differ. Speed is not
always the best
way to
tackle a
problem. There is often too much
emphasis placed on vocabulary. Each of
these
points warrants
individual treatment, and for more information refer to The Triarchic Mind
by RJ Sternberg
(Penguin Books, 1988, p18-36).
It is possible to classify all the reasons
that IQ tests fail at their task into two main groups.
The first
grouping is where the tests assume too much.
Examples of this flaw are the
assumption that
speed is always good, vocabulary is a good indicator of intelligence, and
that different
test taking environments won't affect the outcome. The second grouping
comes because the
tests gauge the wrong items. Examples of
this are different culture
groups being
asked to take the same tests as everyone else, and the fact that the tests
ignore so many
types of intelligence (like physical, social, etc). These two groupings
illustrate where
the major failings of popular IQ tests occur and can be used as tools for
judging others.
IQ tests are not good indicators for a person's
overall intelligence, but as their use
has shown, they
are extremely helpful in making predictions about how a person will
perform in an
academic setting. Perhaps the problem
comes in the name intelligence tests
when it is
obvious this is not what they really are.
The modern IQ test definitely
has its
applications in today's society but should be be used to quantify a person's
overall
intelligence by
any means.
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