| Date: | April 8, 2006 12:40 pm |
| Subject: | Psychology | | Word Count: | 659 | | Page Count: | 3 |
Psychology Why IQ tests don't test intelligence 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 intelligence,
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 considered 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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