IQ testing

We all know what IQ is. It's a supposed measure of how smart we are, and a lot of people are fine with it. We tend to like how we can give a specific number to how smart we are. It may be a semi-useful tool today, but it was inspired by and used for a negative purpose during its infancy.

It all started with the eugenics movement back in the early 1900s. Eugenics in this context is basically only letting the very best have the ability to reproduce, hypothetically moving towards a better population. Those in the eugenics movement needed a good way to quantitatively identify mental retardation, which started the path for IQ testing.

Now we're into the early days of IQ testing. The test wasn't as we know it today. In those days, it consisted of some tasks memory testing. The tests were designed to give your mental age, a term that's becomming increasingly common again. Your IQ was your mental age/physical age*100, so if you're 20 and your mental age is 20, you would have an IQ of 100.

Nowadays, we have a different method of determining it. Now we have a written test, which determines our knowledge in different areas, then we are scored based on how correct we are. Then, all the scores are put into a program, and this does the math such that the average of all the scores is exactly 100, and the standard deviation is 15. The major problem with this is that by definition, exactly half of the people who take the test are below average intelligence. This may not seem much of a problem, but when coupled with the fact that the scores are constantly in flux, they never remain constant. If you had an IQ of 60 in 1970, you could have the exact same test scores give you an IQ of 150, depending on who takes the test.

The way I look at IQ tests is that they can be useful in estimating what is usually painfully obvious. After researching the test, I'm in the camp that believes IQ testing belongs with the "What kind of toaster are you?" personality tests.