Can You Measure A Person’s Intelligence?

In some schools there are programs that only a few kids get to be in. Sometimes they call it GATE1, sometimes Enrichment or Advanced lessons. Why do some students get this opportunity and some don’t?

Often, to qualify, students included in the advanced programs are tested. Sometimes it’s based on their state scores or they are given an I.Q. test 2for this purpose. How do schools know that these tests will give them accurate information about their students? Let’s learn a little about I.Q. tests and then you can be the judge.

Author of the first I.Q. test, Alfred Binet was a French psychologist (1857-1911) who was interested in the concept of human intelligence. He was asked to help French public schools determine which students needed a special learning environment since French laws had recently made it mandatory for all children to go to school. He and a partner created the Binet-Simon scale to measure the child’s “mental age.” This tool was supposed to help schools design lessons that allowed all of the French children to learn by informing their teachers about what the student knew already. This scale eventually became the I.Q. Test we know today.

Even though he wrote the scale, Binet spoke out about the limitations of it. He insisted that intelligence is variable3, meaning that intelligence changes all the time. His objective with the scale was to advocate for education for ALL children. But when the scale came to the USA in 1908, it was brought by a man named H. H. Goddard who was interested in promoting the idea that some races were
superior to others. The test began to be used to give
people a score for their intelligence, as if it were
something we can measure.4

If intelligence changes, then how can we measure it?
An I.Q. score is kind of like a driver’s license that says your weight; your weight can change all the time! What if you lose or gain weight? Now your number license is wrong. Also the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) is reluctant to change your weight on your driver’s license. In the same way, how can we measure intelligence and give people a score? What if you learn more? What if a person thinks they are smart and stops learning? What if the school is reluctant to change your score when you learn more?

The truth is, it is impossible to measure what a person is going to do. We can make predictions based on the past, but humans have an amazing capacity for growing. Do you want to let a test define your intelligence?

1 GATE: Gifted and Talented Education

2 I.Q. test: Intelligence Quotient test. This test asks a series of questions to attempt to measure a person’s intelligence as compared to other people.

3 variable: capable of being changed, or alterable
4 Siegler, R. S. (1992). The other Alfred Binet. Developmental Psychology, 28, 179-190.