Standardized Thinking

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.

Most standardized test do not measure emotional or mechanical intelligence, actually a lot of educators argue that standardized test do not measure comprehension or actual intelligence but rather memorization. While others may believe that standardized testing just needs a few improvements, others believe that it is impossible to have a test that measures accurately the capability of a diverse student population. Today’s schooling depends heavily on the test scores from standardized test. Standardized testing should not have so much weight put on them because they have a negative impact on effective education, students’ self-concept, and learning styles.

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

On the contrary, those people who scored low on one kinds of ability test, were more likely to score badly on others as well. Meanwhile, Spearman also concluded that intelligence is a cognitive ability which could be measured and expressed numerically.

IQ tests measure cognitive ability, but they usually assess cultural learning more than pure, natural intelligence.

Intelligence by definition is “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills” (Oxford Dictionary, 2014). However, many psychologists argue that there is no standard definition of ‘intelligence’, and there have been many different theories over time as psychologists try to find better ways to define this concept (Boundless 2013). While some believe in a single, general intelligence, others believe that intelligence involves multiple abilities and skills. Another largely debated concept is whether intelligence is genetically determined and fixed, or whether is it open to change, through learning and environmental influence. This is commonly known as the nature vs. nurture debate.

Tests should not determine if you’re smart enough or capable of doing something. For example the SAT and ACT are tests that determine what university you’re capable of getting into. Most students don’t do well in tests but are very intelligent that means they’re book smart. Standardized testing affects the future of many people, for example if they’re smart and have a 4.0 gpa but get less than 1000 in the SAT, that means the student won’t get into a great

intelligence. On one hand, many people believe that standardized testing should not be used because they say it is not a good way to judge a person’s real-world intelligence. On the other hand, however, others argue that standardized testing is an excellent way to predict a person’sintelligence. A professor at the University of Delaware named Linda S. Gottfredson wrote an article explaining the pros of standardized testing. In this article she states that standardized tests are a great tool for finding out how intelligent an individual is. While many people agree with her on that they do not think that intelligence has a direct correlation with how well a person is able to perform a job. Gottfredson disagrees with this statement by saying that studies have been done proving that people with higher IQs are able to perform their jobs better than someone who has a lower one. She also goes against the idea of job training is more important that intelligence.

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”.

Today’s education system has become focused on standardized intelligence testing and what works best for the majority. This system, although created to help the masses, is impersonal and only benefits a specific group of students who learn the best through testing. Those students who think creatively and use imagination are left behind. This is why intelligence tests are not accurate measurement of a child’s knowledge as it does not account for creativity and the child’s individual strengths. Changes need to be made within the school system. Instead of focusing on what is “correct” schools should be encouraging problem-solving through the process of making mistakes and failing. This challenges a student to learn about themselves and the world around them. When everything is already laid out for them it is easy to follow. There is no single way of thinking. By making a student have to think on their own it stimulates creativity and allows them to better connect concepts to real world situations.

However, the authors went on to say that presently, 80% of states use identification definitions that include creativity, approximately 70% use definitions that include artistic abilities, and slightly more than half of states use definitions that include leadership abilities (175). Even with this recent recognition of other abilities, IQ test scores are still being used as a determining factor in most American schools.

Many times a student will “memorize” what they need to know on the test. They will not truly memorize the material because they will soon forget it after the test. Since test taking is generally the only way that people are evaluated upon, this leads to society having more smart kids than intelligent ones. Kids will often get into college because they are smart, but many times they can’t solve a complex problem because they lack that intellect to do so. There are many intelligent people who never go to college because they have an idea that they need to get out to the world. This is possibly why many inventors and successful college dropouts are innovative individuals that start a business to help them gain wealth. There are far more smart people than there are intelligent ones.

When a person utters the word “intelligence,” people tend to think of a genius like Albert Einstein developing some obscure equation that the great majority of the population will never understand. The problem with the definition of intelligence is that people relate intelligence to words like “genius” which require intelligence but do not have the same definition as intelligence. Often, people try to use related words to define intelligence, but these words are unable to define intelligence since many are only different levels of intelligence. While many definitions try to encompass the meaning of intelligence and various definitions describe a small part of intelligence, no definition completely explains intelligence, because