Hey Smarty-pants!
When my father went back to graduate school to obtain a degree in School Psychology, my brother and I, both still in grade school, became early test subjects as he learned to administer common school-related tests, including IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests. “You both scored well,” he told us when we were a little older. “One of you got a 132, and one of you got a 136. I’m not telling you who scored higher.” This anecdote has remained with me since childhood, and now that I understand IQ tests myself, I recognize it is not because I value the scores on these tests. In fact, over time, I’ve developed deep concerns about the ways that IQ tests have been and continue to be used. What resonates from that early example is the assortment of ways I internalized other messages about IQ scores: that there are ways to quantify “smartness” in one simple number; that there are rankings and one can be above or below other people; and that, most insidiously, this particular amount of “smartness” measured by the test is static, and will remain relatively the same over the course of your life. In other words, intelligence is innate, genetically determined, and can be used to categorize people into different groups with terms like: gifted, genius, average, special-needs, or intellectually-disabled.
Intelligence is a concept, not a measurable thing. Let me say this again for the people in the back: intelligence is a concept. A concept is an abstract idea, an umbrella term that captures the spirit of something, but can’t be pinned down with exact measurements. When we think about concepts like beauty or love, we understand that different people will have different definitions of these terms, and that cultural and social forces influence our perceptions as well.
Intelligence is defined as “a capacity to understand,” and from this lens it is already easy to understand the various ways intelligence can manifest: understanding form and flow in music, understanding how light refracts off different surfaces, understanding how to craft language to shift emotions, and understanding how mathematical equations predict actions in the world—all of these illustrate various ways of experiencing intelligence. We recognize our own patterns of understanding and curiosity and that these are different between people: my partner is a material physicist, and I am a poet. We learn so much from each other, and yet my brain works very hard and often freezes when trying to think about the experiments he describes. In turn, he asks very practical questions about the reasons for line breaks or punctuation choices in my writing. It’s a beautiful thing that humans have such diversity in thinking, and such radically different ways of experiencing the world.
And then we have intelligence tests. A quick history to ground us here: A French psychologist named Alfred Binet was asked by the French government, in 1904, to create a test that would help identify students who were falling behind in school, and might benefit from extra support. Binet did just that, and thus created a test to measure skill levels across different areas of academics taught in French schools. Let me be clear—Binet created this test as a test of academic skills (as opposed to some innate intelligence), and as a way to identify students who needed support (as opposed to categorizing students as smart or not). Binet was very vocal during his lifetime about how this test should be used and how it might be abused. He was clear that the scores derived from this test were measures of academic skill at a particular time, and that scores could, and would, change.
At this same time, psychologists in America were interested in very different types of projects. American Psychology, like all American institutions, never grappled directly with America’s founding as a country based on colonization, enslavement of human beings, and a belief in white exceptionalism. Rather than interrogate and challenge this history, American Psychology doubled down on the concept that there is a natural hierarchy of humans based on race and class, and found ways to use scientific practices—like testing—to “prove” that some people were superior to others. This is how Binet’s testing was taken up in the United States during the early 1900s.
A group of white, rich, male psychologists were hired to create a new version of Binet’s test to evaluate the “intelligence” of army recruits. These men naturally assumed that they themselves were prime examples of peak intelligence, and created tests that represented the type of knowledge that they possessed (after being educated in all-white, male, privileged institutions of learning, of course). Questions on these early “intelligence tests” included, I kid you not: “The Wyandotte is a type of: a) horse b) fowl c) cattle d) granite”, and “The Pierce Arrow car is made in a) Buffalo b) Toledo c) Detroit d) Flint.” Not surprisingly, recent immigrants, individuals without advanced education, and humans who neither owned cars nor specialized in the subgenera of chickens (a.k.a., most humans), scored toward what was then called “feeble-mindedness.”
Reader, I can personally assert that the IQ tests today are not so very different. Sure, the questions have been changed to represent more “culturally-neutral” material, and statistical sciences have allowed for better understanding about test reliability, but what we call IQ tests are not actually testing intelligence. As emphatically stated above, intelligence is a massive concept and is impossible to measure in a single test. So what are they actually measuring?
The two most common intelligence tests, the Stanford Binet and the Weschler Intelligence Scales, measure very particular sets of skills. Although there are slight differences between the two tests, both focus on comprehending patterns, mathematics and visual processing, vocabulary and verbal language skills, and short-term memory. If intelligence is “a capacity to understand,” these tests measure very narrow, very specific skills and then use these results to make sweeping judgements—judgements that often have lifelong impacts—about people’s overall abilities which, in a capitalistic society, translates to worthiness. Yikes.
Currently, IQ tests are most commonly used in behemoth institutions like the public education system (to sort students into “gifted” or “special education” programs, which set the path for the rest of educational life), the prison-industrial complex (where a massive number of incarcerated persons test in the “intellectual disability range” —no surprise if you are testing people who are under duress and not engaging with the test willingly), and in vocational programming that tries to place people into appropriate tracks for employment (which I emphatically argue is not best determined by arbitrary numbers on a shitty test).
There are of course ways to use these tests positively. In the spirit of their originator, Alfred Binet—who is no doubt rolling double-time in his grave—these tests can be used to identify needs and then offer support; there are psychologists and school systems that do employ testing in this way. If you ever tested into a gifted program, you probably benefited from this use of IQ tests. Still, when there is so much use in ways that cause harm and uphold problematic power structures, it is important to ask: who do these tests really serve?
Raging about IQ tests really leaves me in need of some R&R —I’ll be taking a break for a few weeks and will see you all again in October! Until then, friends, stay smart in all the wild ways that cannot be, will never be, captured in tests.
