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.