Downplaying the old IQ numbers racket Though Actress Judy Holliday specialized in playing dumb blondes, legend
has it that she possessed a towering 172 IQ. Spiro Agnew says his is
135, which puts him well into the ranks of the intellectually superior.
South Korea's Kim Ung-Yong, a 14-year-old prodigy who was speaking four
languages and solving integral calculus problems at age four, is said
to tip the mental scales at 210, worth a mention in the Guinness Book
of World Records. Even Yankee Slugger Reggie Jackson brags as much
about his IQ as his B.A. . Poor Reggie—nobody is all that impressed any more. The day is long past
when the IQ was revered as some sort of magic number, affixed during
childhood as an indelible, immutable badge of mental prowess or
dullness. Instead, the whole IQ concept is under suspicion. Many school
systems, including those in California and New York City, have
abandoned IQ testing altogether. College admissions officers have
little use for them. Neither do such competitive organizations as NASA,
IBM or Phi Beta Kappa. It was 72 years ago when a French psychologist named Alfred Binet first
devised a test that attempted to measure a child's intelligence.
Seeking a way to distinguish truly retarded students from laggards with
hidden ability, Binet developed a series of exercises involving
completion of pictures and the assembling of objects, as well as
problems in math, vocabulary and reasoning. To score the test, an
equation was devised that divided a child's mental age—as determined
by the test —by his chronological age, thus producing an “intelligence
quotient.” If a six-year-old child was thinking like most other
six-year-olds, for example, his IQ was 100. If he was thinking like an
eight-year-old, his IQ was 133. Today, close to 200 different tests are in use. They attempt primarily
to gauge four abilities: verbal and numerical skills, spatial relations
and reasoning. Of the four best-known tests , the
Stanford-Binet is the closest to Binet's original; it takes as long as
1 hrs., is administered to students individually, and results in a
single IQ score. The Wechsler test, also given individually, reports an
IQ score for both its verbal and nonverbal sections, as well as an
overall figure. The Otis-Lennon, a group test, measures “general
intelligence.” The Culture Fair Intelligence Test
concentrates more on the interpretation of diagrams; to avoid any
cultural bias inherent in language, it employs no verbal questions at
all.
