Testing: The Growing Unimportance of IQs

After four years of doing without schooling, Negro junior high students in Virginia’s Prince Edward County returned to class in September 1963. In the course of the next 18 months, the average IQ of those children rose 18 points. In St. Louis, a cultural enrichment program in slum schools raised the pupils’ average IQ by 11.5 points in four years.

Parents of these children were understandably proud that their kids had shown progress. Yet, they were puzzled too. Like most people, they were under the impression that an IQ is a measure of an inherent trait called intelligence, and that it never varies; that it is either a badge or a blemish to be worn indelibly for all time. As it happens, those notions are largely myths that for years have caused parents needless concern.

“Gumption Quotient.” First of all, as the results in Prince Edward County and St. Louis showed, intelligence test scores do vary. But more to the point is the fact that IQ tests measure not intelligence but what the experts call the “learned responses” of an individual to a series of questions or problems. Thus, IQ serves chiefly to give teachers some idea of a youngster’s ability to do academic work. Even here, many teachers make the mistake of using IQ to predict a child’s future achievements.

Educators’ files are filled with records of kids who excelled in IQ tests but who failed to live up to expectations. “A child may score in the 140s and yet be too darned lazy to read a book or do any of the tough groundwork, and he’ll fail at school,” says the National Merit Scholarship Corporation’s John Stalnaker. “Another kid may score much lower in the tests but by sheer devotion to his work, he’ll succeed.”

The standard IQ tests, agrees Charles O. Ruddy, associate superintendent of schools in Boston, give no clue to a student’s “gumption quotient.” Moreover, it is not uncommon to find an error of ten points or more in many IQ scores. For example, a child with 120 may not necessarily be brighter than one with 110 or dumber than one with 130.*

Nowadays, the classic Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler-Bellevue IQ tests are given only when educators need to pinpoint the mental ability of someone who seems unusually gifted or retarded and so needs special guidance. They must be administered by an expert and require a session of one hour for each student. Much more common are group intelligence tests (experts prefer to call them “scholastic aptitude” tests) such as the Otis Mental Ability test, which comes in an all-picture version for Grades 1 to 4 and with multiple choice questions for Grades 4 to 9 (see cut).

Beehives & Birds’ Nests. Most of the tests are designed to gauge four abilities: verbal (“Which word means the opposite of sad?”); numerical (“One number is wrong in the following series: 1 6 2 6 3 6 4 6 5 6 7 6. What should it be?”); space conceptualization (“Which of the five following designs is not like the other four?”); reasoning (“If Bill is taller than Bob and Bob is taller than Ed, then Bill is what to Ed?”). Some test experts rate students separately on these abilities. “A person is not smart or stupid in general,” explains Harvard Psychologist Gerald S. Lesser. “He can be smart and stupid at the same time. Each of us is better at certain things than at others.”

Similarly, the experts have tried to take the “cultural bias” out of much testing. The more a test depends on verbal ability, for example, the more it favors the kid whose parents speak well or who read to him. The Otis all-picture test includes sketches of beehives and birds’ nests, which may be more familiar to a country child than to a kid from a metropolitan housing project. Still, the question of cultural bias can lead to equally difficult problems. It may be, as Theodore Stolarz, director of the Chicago Teachers College Graduate School, contends, that IQ tests mainly predict “how a kid with a good middle-class background will do in middle-class schools.” But so far, nobody has devised a “culture free” test that is particularly useful. Besides, such a test might be pointless since the aim of testing is to help guide children toward success in a culture of broad middle-class values. “If a child does poorly on an aptitude test because he comes from the wrong side of the tracks,” says the Educational Testing Service’s vice president, Henry S. Dyer, “it isn’t the test that is unfair; it is the hard facts of social circumstance that are unfair.”

A comforting fact for parents is that few school systems any longer use IQ tests as the sole basis for placing children in various ability groups. Teachers are being urged to use common sense judgments based on observation and on the child’s classroom performance. Testing, as a measurement of progress and aptitude, will always have its uses, but the old myth about the omnipotent IQ is finally fading.

* The commonly accepted minimum IQ rating for “genius”: 140.