Essay on IQ Testing

When one speaks of intelligence or how bright another person is, the often quoted figure is the IQ or intelligence quotient. It is the most often used standard of how smart a person is. This paper shall look at what intelligence tests measure, how the IQ tests measure intelligence and interrogate their history. It shall then apply the tests to school policy and hence evaluate their validity.

Knowledge isn’t all about what people know or how well they are in school. IQ tests test the intelligence of the person; however they test the pure thinking capacity rather than what people know. This means that intelligence comes from the entire cognitive thinking ability and not what they

Additionally, Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” There are different forms of intelligence that go beyond what our school system measures. Students are not a unit to be measured, and students cannot be assigned a numerical value to identify their intelligence. Students are diverse—they learn at different speeds, and they learn in different ways. Focusing solely on test scores is hurting our students and deviating away from building our society on success and excellence. Critics are slowly realizing the problems associated with standardized tests—they create anxiety, they are extremely biased, and they do not measure the ability to think deeply.

     Since the development of the intelligence quotient, schools in every part of the world have been using the IQ test to categorize millions of students into three groups. These three groups, which are the gifted, the average, and the retarded, are falsifications that perpetuate in our world culture and cause many gifted students to be deemed retarded and vice a versa. Why then is the IQ test so heavily relied on in our school systems? For schools the answer is simple, an I.Q. test is a reliable predictor of a students later performance in academics. This answer is relatively true, but where the I.Q. test falls extremely short is with testing the multiple

Similarly, many teachers, statewide, feel that these exams that no significant value towards a student’s overall intelligence. According to a survey by both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Scholastic, of more than ten-thousand public school teachers, this report has found that teachers

Testing has been used for centuries in many different ways, not just to test student intelligence levels. According to an article written in Time, the earliest form of a standardized test comes from China where government leaders would be tested on their knowledge of Confucius and poetry. The article continues with the inclusion of testing during the Industrial Revolution. The testing during this period took children who were not in school and measured their knowledge of subjects that students in schools learned. As time went on, more and more advances came to the testing scene. New products included a revised version of the test, called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, and professionals developed the test scanner by 1936. These inventions improved the time necessary to receive results from an IQ test. Today, tests, like the

Most of test is just going to tell what students know on paper, but scores do not show what can an individual apply the knowledge in the real world. For instance, a person who has practice and invested their time on something and apply it in the real world is the one who's going to do well when it comes to who is actually is smart the one who has practice or the one that took the test and did good but is going to do bad because of the person that did not apply outside than a

First, how can a test possibly be able to determine how “smart” a student is? It seems to make more sense to have the teacher the student has been with all year, to make the assessment. Also, some very bright students get test anxiety and cannot show their strengths in high-stakes assessments. When I was in elementary school, even though I did really well in class, I often did not do well on tests. I do not believe that it’s because I am not smart, but that

This study also stated that, “every standardized test has a certain “error of measurement” which means that a given score could actually be off by several points in either direction. High stakes, however, have single scores as the cut-off point. Those scores do not account for the inaccuracies that all test publishers acknowledge”(azstandards). There have been many studies in which students take the same test on different days, and their score varies greatly. High stakes testing does not give any consideration to these errors.

First, assume, with proof, that your intelligence is decided by tests. I thought that standardized testing was left behind in my teenage years. Multiple-choice tests and essay questions were to become a forgotten nightmare of our youths. But our “glorious government leaders” decided to prove me wrong! In under three years. Our lives have transformed into a

Valid – The test must be shown to measure what it is intended to measure. Unbiased – The test should not place students at a disadvantage because of gender, ethnicity, language, or disability.” Yet, all three requirements for a test to be viable do not apply to standardized testing. Results produced are not consistent, as the day to day lives of students are constantly changing; Issues in the students’ lives may affect their thoughts, emotions, and health that would affect the results of their tests, providing a variety of test scores for one person alone. The validity of the test is also in question as it does not account for differences in students’ backgrounds and personal life so test scores do not accurately measure student’s abilities, but rather, it measures their ability to memorize information and test taking skills. Standardized testing holds a very large amount of bias, as the students of different ethnicities, cultures, and languages, have to confront many biased questions that are present in standardized tests. Therefore, standardized testing, according to Zucker’s analysis of an effective test, should not be used as an effective measure for testing students’ intelligence as it breaks the three requirements that make

In addition, these tests rates a student’s performance on simply one certain day and does not take into account outside factors. There are many kids who just don’t do good on tests. Many of these students understand the content and are intelligent, but it doesn’t appear on the test. Some students also develop test anxiety, which affects how well they

Intelligence tests are inaccurate to measures true ability of a person because genes affect how a person responds to their surroundings, the tests cannot measure the person biological makeup or his true potential for being “smart”.

Unfortunately in modern time, students are more concerned to pass a test, than actually learning the material. It’s inconsiderate for schools to feel that throwing test after test will predict and showcase a student’s intelligence. “Most current U.S. standardized tests include only multiple-choice questions and provide no way for students to explain their thinking, says Swartz, of the National Center for Teaching Thinking. “So if a student answers (d) and that's correct, it still raises the question, ‘Is he

The ability to write and speak well are not scored, neither are creativity and problem solving skills. Rather these tests test ability to memorise information that will later be used on the test. This causes unfair manipulation of test scores and less knowledge retention. When we go from expanding knowledge to testing memory this doesn’t allow us to identify skills employers are looking for in youth. Current tests aren’t getting kids ready for the workforce nor are they an accurate measurement of intelligence. They’re a (not always working) measure of a specific type of