The History of IQ tests

IQ tests were introduced by a French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1904. The history of IQ tests was very discriminatory in nature. The tests were designed to segregate intellectually gifted children from those who qualified as normally intelligent. The French government wanted to create a bank of the highly intelligent children and send them to special schools to further hone their skills.

The original test was called the Binet scale, and it involved putting things in a logical order, follow commands and recognize objects. The grading involved measuring the child’s intelligence against the intelligence of other children of his/her age. The scoring of IQ tests still follows the same pattern.

Even though Binet was not directly responsible for the term intelligent quotient but his work put forth the idea that human intelligence could be measured. IQ is actually the ratio of mental age to chronological or actual age. In other words if a 5 year old child passes a test designed for a 10 year old child his intelligence will be calculated by dividing his mental age by his actual age and multiplying it by 100. So this child would have an IQ of 200, which would be incredibly high. However, even Binet admitted the limitations of his work. He did realize that the tests could be misused and did categorically state that the scale was designed to separate children who would benefit from additional coaching but a low IQ score certainly did not mean that the child was incapable of achieving a higher level of intelligence.

But unfortunately, later day psychologist failed to pay heed to Bitnet’s words and many children were brandished as being averagely intelligent and thus not good enough for certain courses. Fortunately, many modern day psychologists believe that IQ scores are certainly not a indisputable measure of intelligence.

The IQ tests that are available in books and on websites today are a refined version of Howard Gardners work, who mentioned that there are seven distinct types of intelligences. This helped to broaden the scope of IQ tests.

IQ tests are still being used across educational institutions in the US and the rest of the world. These tests now have between 3 to 10 subsets which try to target various types of human intelligence or rather test the different types of skills like mathematical, verbal, visual, logical and so on.