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47   Are Intelligence Tests Fair?
     The Washington Post, Saturday, June 3, 1967

      Intelligence stands among the highest of human values.  Yet,
whenever we attempt to measure it, we face such frustration that the
cynicism is universal.  "Intelligence is whatever is measured by
intelligence tests".  This warning is then promptly forgotten and test
scores are used to justify a wide range of social attitudes and
educational schemes to tell people what their proper place in the
world must be.

     The brain is the organ of thought and it would be preposterous
to imagine that any two brains are precisely alike in their inherent
structural ability to process new information and to store and
retrieve the old.

     Even electronic computers which remain quite identical in their
static hardware are completely dependent on the programs that instruct
them to display data-processing virtuosity.  And the human brain
constantly changes its very structure as part of the process by which
it functions.

     "Testing Problems in Perspective" is an important collection of
critical papers recently issued by the American Council on Education
and edited by Prof. Anne Anastasi of the Psychology Department of 
Fordham University.  She remarks, concerning the efforts to produce
"culture-fair" tests of intelligence: "If we start eliminating items
that differentiate subgroups of the population, where shall we stop?
We could with equal justification proceed to rule out items showing
socio-economic differences, sex differences, differences among ethnic
minority groups, and educational differences.  Any items in which
college graduates excel, elementary school graduates could, for
example, be discarded on this basis.  Nor should we retain items that
differentiate among broader groups, such as national cultures, or
between preliterate and more advanced cultures. (But) what will be
left... what will be the validity of this minute residue?"

     Behind these cautionary remarks is the realization that
intelligence tests, despite all the diligent effort to relate them to
inherent brain functions, are necessarily tests of some actual
behavior.  They are then tests of achievement, a measure of the skills
cumulatively acquired by the individual from his earliest history
onward.

     No test has been devised for intelligence that can be
administered outside the framework of a language common to the
examiner and the subject: most of us would score an IQ close to zero
on a Chinese version of the Stanford-Binet.

     If the IQ is inherently a test of achievement rather than
ability, how do we account for its actual merits in predicting
academic performance?  The answer is that it has been standardized
against a moderately wide range of middle-class white American
culture.  It is a fairly broad test of just those skills most highly
relevant to the further educational challenges which the student will
most likely meet in his actual schooling.

     If the child's informational and emotional milieu is normal for
the culture, it may also reflect his inherent biological capacity
to learn. That is, the only behavioral test we have for biological
intelligence is the level of achievement reached in a standard
environment.  But whose environment is standard?

     When we learn more of the biology of the brain, we will probably
discover more objective tests, for example a way to count the number
of neuronal connections in the brain of the newborn child.  And yet,
this could still never tell us what that number might become during
the further growth of the child.

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