Testing, Testing, Testing

By David D. Medina

Intelligence testing has long been a source of heated debate.

In the early 1900s, mental tests were often misused to promote eugenics, restrict immigration, and defend segregation. But they also had positive effects, such as helping promising lower-class students get into good schools.

“The majority of the problem is the way people use tests and their interpretation of tests and not in the tests themselves,” asserts Miguel Quiñones, Rice University associate professor of psychology and management. “If cognitive ability tests are used properly and interpreted properly, they can provide useful information.”

Intelligence tests can assist in ascertaining learning problems. They also can predict rather well how a person will fare in school or on the job. Quiñones has found that people who score higher on an IQ test
generally tend to do better at work and in school. Therefore, he says, the tests can be useful in hiring and admission decisions.

Quiñones has ample experience in testing. In addition to teaching and researching psychological testing and psychometrics, which is the measurement of mental traits, he has worked with the United States Air Force as a consultant on training, evaluation, and transfer issues. He also has teamed with private organizations on a variety of applied psychology projects and co-edited Training for a Rapidly Changing Workplace: Applications of Psychological Research (American Psychological Association, 1997).

The key controversy surrounding intelligence testing, Quiñones says, is whether the tests measure innate ability or acquired knowledge. If they test innate ability as some claim, does that mean intelligence is unchangeable?

The notion that mental ability is largely genetic and can’t be improved has come under serious attack.

In fact, scholar James Flynn has shown that IQ scores in the Western world have increased by 15 points in one generation. The political science professor from New Zealand’s University of Otago also has concluded that Americans of the 1970s were 22 points smarter than Americans of the 1890s.

“At one time, our society was sorted by physical strength then by social status,” Quiñones says. “Now our ranking has become one sorted by intelligence.” It is no surprise, he adds, that cognitive ability testing is a multimillion-dollar business in the United States.

Intelligence testing was first used in the late 1800s by Francis Galton of England. An amateur psychologist, Galton believed that intelligence was hereditary and thus advocated the breeding of superior minds in order for society to advance. He coined the term “eugenics,” the science of improving stock.

When France instituted compulsory education in 1904 and needed a way to identify children with learning difficulties, Alfred Binet, with the help of Theodore Simon, created a test to determine which children were developing at normal rates within their age group. While Galton’s earlier idea of intelligence was based on sensory and motor abilities, Binet tested a combination of cognitive abilities, such as memory, word association, and sentence completion.

In 1912, German psychologist William Stern added a measuring scale to Binet’s test. He divided the child’s mental age by his or her chronological age and multiplied the result by one hundred. This became known as the intelligence quotient, or IQ. For example, a child of four with a mental age of two had an IQ of 50. Stanford University professor and psychologist Lewis M. Terman saw certain flaws in the Binet test and made major revisions to it. The Stanford-Binet was published in 1916 and has become the standard test for measuring intelligence.

American psychologist Henry Goddard, who believed that intelligence was hereditary and unchangeable, started using the Binet test in U.S. public schools at the turn of the century. In 1913, he applied intelligence testing to immigrants arriving at Ellis Island to determine who should be admitted into the United States. According to Goddard’s tests, four-fifths of the Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians were “feeble-minded.” Deportations rose by 350 percent in 1913, and in 1924, immigration law reduced the quotas for southern and eastern Europeans to less than one-fifth of that for northern and western Europeans. In 1931, Goddard influenced legislators in 27 states to pass laws that authorized eugenic sterilization for “mentally defective” people.

Criticism of intelligence tests began as early as 1920.

Some opponents accuse the tests of being culturally biased. Quiñones agrees that this may have been true for early versions of intelligence tests but is not as much of a problem today. “Test developers have become very sensitive to this issue and employ elaborate review processes to ensure that tests are free from cultural bias,” Quiñones says. Interestingly, studies that have attempted to examine the effect of cultural bias tend to show that eliminating items that a group of reviewers deem as being culturally biased has little effect on the overall scores. Furthermore, it is very difficult to get individuals to agree ahead of time on what constitutes a culturally biased item.

Another criticism of IQ tests is the self-fulfilling prophecy issue. Claude Steele, a psychologist at Stanford University, has shown that people who are expected to score low generally will do so. Black students in particular, he says, suffer from what he calls “stereotype vulnerability.” But Steele asserts that stereotype vulnerability is not limited to blacks. He once gave a group of white students a math test and told them that Asians tended to do better on it than whites. The result proved his point. “That may be enough of a reason to say that labeling someone early is not an appropriate thing to do,” Quiñones suggests.

A third issue is whether intelligence tests measure an innate core of mental ability known as general intelligence. Some studies have shown that people who score well on a mathematics test will probably do well on vocabulary. “Some people have taken that as evidence that there is a general level of intelligence that underlies all mental abilities,” says Quiñones. Opponents of this view say that there are many dimensions to intelligence and that IQ tests are not broad enough to measure abilities such as musical and mechanical talents. “The multiple intelligence view appeals to people’s sense of fairness,” notes Quiñones. “They can say, ‘Oh, Johnny may not be so smart in math, but he’s one heck of a violinist.’”

Some people favor banning intelligence tests altogether. But Quiñones wonders if we can live without these tests. The problem, he reiterates, lies not with the tests themselves but with the testers. People need to be educated about what these tests really do tell us and what they don’t tell us. Tests, he explains, are not perfect predictors, and they are not necessarily the most important predictors. They don’t indicate factors such as a person’s goodness.

An all-out ban on testing is unlikely. “But,” Quiñones says, “it is really incumbent for the critics of IQ tests to come up with an alternative that is better than what we have.”

Until that happens, keep your pencils sharp, because people will continue testing, testing, testing.