Iq Testing

3 Pages 717 Words

IQ Testing


The task of trying to calculate a person’s intelligence has been a goal of psychologists since before the beginning of this century. The Binet-Simon scales were first proposed in 1905 in Paris, France and various sorts of tests have been evolving ever since. One of the important concerns that always arise regarding these tools is what are the tests really measuring? Are they measuring a person’s intelligence? Their ability to perform well on standardized tests? Or just some arbitrary quantity of the person’s IQ? In this paper I will try and answer some of these concerns.
When probing the situations around which IQ tests are given and the content of the tests themselves, it becomes apparent that however useful the tests may be for standardizing a group’s intellectual ability, they are not always the best indicator of intelligence. To issue a truly standardized test, the testing environment should be the same for everyone involved. If anything has been learned from the psychology of perception, it is clear that a person’s environment has a great deal to do with their cognitive abilities. Is the light flickering? Is the temperature too hot or too cold? Is the chair uncomfortable? Or even worse, are the individuals ill that day?
To test a person’s mind, it is essential to employ their body in the procedure. If everyone is placed in different conditions during the testing, how is the test expected to get standardized results. Therefore it’s because of this assumption that everyone will perform equally independent of his or her environment.
Intelligence test scores are skewed and cannot be viewed as standardized, and definitely not as an example of a person’s intelligence. It is obvious that a person’s intelligence stems from a variety of traits. A few that are often tested are reading comprehension, vocabulary, and spatial relations. But this is not all that goes into it. What abo...