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 (he claims a 160) as his B.A. (his 1977 batting average was a solid .286).
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 (see chart), the Stanford-Binet is the closest to Binet's original; it takes as long as 1½ 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." (Sample question from the version for ten-year-olds: "What is the opposite of 'easy'?") 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.