Website owner: James Miller
On the IQ concept
I have always rejected the concept of IQ (Intelligence Quotient). A high IQ number may reflect some type of composite measure of some things. It may reflect a measure of the degree of a person’s intellectual development in one or more respects (as in a good vocabulary acquired through much reading, understanding of arithmetic, reasoning ability, and perhaps a person’s intellectual maturity and exposure to many ideas), but it does not represent any kind of innate mental capability or ability.
One of my personality traits has always been “slowness” and slowness tends to be equated with “dumbness”. Any test that has a time limit, such as IQ tests or SAT tests, are biased against slow people. People who are slower and can’t finish the test are penalized because of their slowness and receive lower scores. They get lower scores even if they got all of the questions they answered right. The implication is that slowness corresponds to “dumbness”. These kinds of tests serve as filters. They screen out certain kinds of people (like “slow” people) and reward the opposite types.
The following is from Thomas Sowell. Inside American Education. p. 129
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Even on so-called "intelligence" tests (as distinguished from "aptitude" or skills tests such as the SAT), whole nations have, over a period of decades, significantly increased the number of questions they can answer correctly, though this worldwide phenomenon has been inadvertently concealed by re-norming of I.Q. tests to produce the definitional average I.Q. of 100. In other words, the same number of correct answers which would have given an individual an I.Q. of 110 fifty years ago might give that individual's son or daughter an I.Q. of 90 today, because the average person today answers more questions correctly—and whatever the average number of correct answers might be at a given time is, by definition, equal to an I.Q. of 100.
When whole nations do significantly better on I.Q. tests over time, this undermines the claim that such tests (or any tests) measure "real" or genetically innate ability. So too does a change in the relative standing of different groups, such as the Jews, who scored below average on intelligence tests given to American soldiers in the First World War, but who have since scored above the national average.
Test results within some other nations likewise suggest that test scores may provide valid predictions without necessarily measuring so-called "real" ability or innate potential. In the Philippines, for example, people growing up in Manila tend to score higher on standardized tests than do people in the hinterlands. This may well be because of differences in social circumstances rather than differences in innate or "real" ability.
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See
IQ Concept and Standardized Tests
The IQ concept versus the philosophy of hard work
Theory of intelligence --- IQ concept
Intellectuals, IQ, race, and multiculturalism
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