What Does IQ Test and IQ Quiz Actually Assess?

If a test or quiz on Intelligence Quotient is accordingly intended to appraise the intelligence of an individual, still one significant question remains: What actually is intelligence? Does this refer to the capability to perform well in school? Or does this simply refer to the competence of an individual to read well, write eloquently, and spell correctly?

Controversies as to the exact definition of the word ‘intelligence’ are yet to be resolved. And although there are definitions of the said word as provided by dictionaries, still the question lies in the morass of obscurity seeing that the word intelligence has never been sufficiently and properly delineated and for that reason no one really knows what an IQ quiz or test is assumed to appraise. On the other hand, even if there is an insufficiency of defining the said term, but still the future of a number of children are utterly determined by the outcomes of this IQ test or quiz.

Previously, during the early 1920s, the renowned correspondent named Walter Lippmann firmly argued that IQ quiz or tests were actually nothing but a sequence of stunts or aerobatics because according to him one cannot really and exactly quantify the intelligence of an individual especially when the term itself has not yet been clearly defined.

However, during the year 1962, Banesh Hoffman revealed something that stunned the American people about the “tyranny of testing” which he further elucidated in his classic book of the same title. This particular book, and also his other scholarly writings that followed, drastically stirred up a number of controversy, which had led the National Education Association in the year 1976 to highly suggest for the abolition of taking group standardized intelligence tests, aptitude tests, and even achievement tests.

Furthermore, the National Education Association (NEA), having a huge number of members of roughly two million teachers, has called out for the elimination of standardized intelligence tests seeing that these are at their best, inefficient, and at their worst, detrimental.

In the present day, voices calling out for the abolition of standardized tests are not so many. One of these advocates is Linda S. Siegel, a professor in the Department of Special Education and Educational Psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Siegel strongly proposes the abandonment of the IQ test in analyzing the Learning Development or LD of a child.

Based on a good number of definitions, intelligence is composed of skills than include problem solving, critical thinking, logical reasoning, and adaptation. This set-up appears undeniably impeccable and reasonable, not until somebody thoroughly scrutinizes the contents of IQ tests or IQ quizzes. As operationally used, the definition of intelligence virtually includes no skills which can be intrinsically identified in terms of the strict definitions of intelligence.

What Does IQ Test and IQ Quiz Actually Assess?