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IQ Tests - Brief History

Around 1900 the French Government, the only government in the world alert enough to do so, noted that children moving from farms to

cities seemed to lose intelligence. The Government asked Professor of Philosophy Alfred Binet to look into the problem. Being aware of the scientific method, Professor Binet made careful observations of what six-year-old (and other) children knew and could do, their vocabularies, their computational abilities, their abilities to assemble correctly a dis-assembled picture of a human face, etc. After determining what was “normal” for a six year old to be able to do, Binet then had a standard against which all children could be measured.

It is important to note that Binet was looking for deficiencies in learning, not one’s strengths. Binet fervently believed that at birth all children are geniuses and if they are not thinking effectively, corrective measures should be taken. The IQ test was then a diagnostic instrument, not a tool to categorize people.

Alfred Binet

Immediately, Binet’s tests, as modified by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, was mis-used to “prove” that Eastern European Jews should be barred from immigrating to the United States, that Negroes were inferior to Whites, that the ruling classes of Europe were genetically empowered to rule, etc.

High in the Academic world there have always been exponents of such racist and “laws of the jungle” theories, based upon a mis-reading of Charles Darwin and what IQ scores truly signify. Britain’s foremost educational psychologist, Sir Cyril Burt, went so far as to fake his data to prove that class distinctions were justified on genetic grounds. The “Nature vs Nurture” debate further heated up in 1969 with the publication of University of California Professor Arthur Jensen’s article – the longest article ever published in the Harvard Educational Review -- in which the most senior educational psychologist in the United States actually proposed that the reason Blacks scored lower on IQ tests than Whites was genetic, not because of cultural discrimination. (At that very moment, 1964 to be exact, according to the American Colleges and Universities “Blue Book”, Black students at Prairie View A&M were supported at the level of $1350 per year by the state of Texas, while White students were supported at $6500 per year at Texas A&M, a five-fold difference, a difference that characterized southern U.S. education at all levels.)

The debate then died down to be re-ignited in the 1990s by Harvard’s Richard Herrnstein’s and political pundit Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve which again offered bogus evidence that IQ is based upon some genetic quality, with Blacks again coming up short.

As early as the 1950’s Professor Anne Roe at Harvard showed that while IQ may be important if one is in or above the “normal range,” after that threshold, other factors determines one’s success at one’s profession or trade. Professor Roe announced with some surprise that the 65 greatest American scientists were just a bit above average in intelligence, about 126 average. She was interested in those other factors that produced success. (Anne Roe, The Making of A Scientist. New York. Dodd Mead, 1952)

In essence, while the original stimulus behind IQ testing was noble and praiseworthy, I Q scores have been so abused and misunderstood that mankind would be well advised to seek alternatives. ULTRA is the first major alternative to tests similar to the Stanford-Binet IQ test.