IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient. IQ tests have been known as the easiest way to measure a person's intelligence since it began in France in 1904. The French government commissioned psychologist Alfred Binet to find a way to separate children by their intelligence. The government wanted to put the intelligent children in a separate school from the intellectually inferior ones, this was to give these children the opportunity to get individual attention instead of grouped with children that were "smarter" than they were as well, the government wanted to give the intellectual children a chance to learn without disruption. This led Binet to create the Binet Scale, which he stated was to be used to determine which children needed special education and which children did not. It was not supposed to be used as a general device for ranking all pupils at their mental worth. Intelligence could not be considered by just one score, according to Binet and therefore anyone trying to do so would be condemning a child to being thought of as stupid and could negatively affect their educational level and experience.
The Binet scale was profoundly used in the United States, and it was not used properly. The psychologists and educators that used the scale did not heed Binet's concerns that the scale was actually limiting, and intelligence testing was soon seen as being more important that it actually was.
The unreliability of an Intelligence Quotient test has been proven more than one time. Someone may do exceptionally well during one testing period, he or she could take the same test again, and do poorly or more poorly than they did the first time that they took the test. There is also a bias that should be taken into account when looking at test scores. One study showed that 99 school psychologists scored IQ tests taken from the exact same records and they came up with several different scores for the same individual.
So the question is, what are Intelligence Quotients really testing when they are given, and what is intelligence? Is it being able to do well in school or is it more common sense? Just because someone does poorly on an IQ test may not mean that they are unintelligent at all. The facts as to what makes someone unintelligent have not really been measured in the proper way, and intelligence like beauty is really in the eye of the beholder.
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