IQ --- Testing intelligence

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IQ — Testing intelligence

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Is Reality Optional? pp. 43 - 44.

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DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND: To an American, the city of Dunedin, in southern New Zealand, may seem to be about as far away as you can get on this planet. Yet, in this isolated little port on the Pacific, there is an expatriate American whose research has worldwide significance. He is Professor James R. Flynn, of' Otago University, who is conducting a global study of how well various peoples do on mental tests.

This controversial and potentially explosive subject is handled by Professor Flynn with great scholarly care, and with penetrating insight into the very complicated issues involved. His statistics cover more than a dozen countries, stretching from Britain to Japan to the United States to New Zealand.

Jim Flynn is not just a numbers-cruncher, however. He knows the ins and outs of the many different I. Q. tests and what the mysterious scores that come out of them mean—and don't mean. Why is all this important? Because his analysis gives us clues as to what intelligence itself is and what differences in results on "intelligence tests" mean.

Many of the early pioneers in mental testing were convinced from the outset that intelligence was inherited. From this they concluded that the government should follow policies designed to perpetuate the most intelligent individuals and races, and to see that the least intelligent faded away to extinction. If you just let nature take its course, they reasoned, the least intelligent people would tend to have the largest families and become a growing proportion of the population, thereby lowering the average intelligence of nations and of the human species in general.

Professor Jim Flynn's worldwide research shows that, contrary to this reasoning and these predictions, the average mental test performance has risen by large amounts over the past few generations. Whole nations have had their scores rise by more than the current I. Q. difference between blacks and whites, for example. This enormously important fact is obscured by the way I. Q. scores are figured.

By definition, the average I. Q. is 100. If the average person answers 52 questions correctly on a given I.Q. test, then 52 right answers becomes an I. Q. of 100. Twenty years later, if the average person answers 65 questions correctly, then 65 right answers becomes an I. Q. of 100. Anybody who answers 52 questions correctly now may end up with an I. Q. in the80s.

What Professor Flynn's research shows is that more and more people are answering more and more I. Q. test questions correctly, in countries around the world. Only relatively briefly do nations' I.Q.s rise, however, because the new number of correct answers soon becomes the new norm for an I. Q of 100.

These large, but concealed, improvements in I.Q. test performance around the world shoot down many ideas about intelligence. The idea of genetically fixed intelligence is hard to believe, in the wake of major changes in I. Q. test performance from one generation to the next. Flynn even questions whether I. Q. tests really measure intelligence.

The number of people who answer enough questions correctly to be considered "geniuses" by the original I. Q. standards has gone up by leaps and bounds. Yet we see no corresponding increase in the kind of people who could be compared to Beethoven, Einstein, or Galileo. The ability to answer a lot of routine questions rapidly does not add up to genius.

It's not that I. Q. tests or other mental tests "don't mean anything." They mean a lot in some contexts and not much in others.

Even tests of mere information can be very useful, if that information is needed to pursue some educational goal or career goal. Tests of reasoning ability, or facility with language or mathematics, may also be valuable, depending on what these tests are used for.

Mental tests cannot be simply waved aside as "irrelevant: as some have tried to do, especially since the 1960s. Many able minority students, for example, have been needlessly sacrificed by being thrown into college situations where they had little or no chance of surviving academically, because they were grossly mismatched with an institution whose other students had far higher Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. It is little short of a crime to have youngsters flunking out of high-pressure institutions, when they could graduate with honors from most American colleges.

Mental tests need to be looked at with common sense—not with awe or with sweeping dismissals. Professor Jim Flynn's research should help us all to see these tests in perspective.

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7 May 24