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.