
Kylie Firmin '26
Since time immemorial, humanity has had an unquenchable interest in discovering who is Good and who is Bad.
Whose health is Good versus whose health is Bad. Whose morals are Good versus whose are Bad. And most importantly for the subject at hand: whose intellect is Good versus whose intellect is Bad.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) holds quite a bit of bearing over how we see other people. It’s drilled into kids from a relatively young age through media that this one number can single-handedly summarize everything that the human mind is capable of.
According to the University of Michigan, though, IQ is really a measurement of “your reasoning and problem-solving abilities.” Undeniably important things for humans to have, but not all there is to consider about a person.
If one falls flat in terms of problem-solving, I don’t think that necessarily means they don’t have a firm grasp on English, mathematics, or anything of the sort. It really only indicates that they may have difficulty applying that knowledge to a situation. That’s not a lack of intelligence, it’s a lack of a specific skill relating to intelligence.
Alfred Binet—one of the creators of the first IQ test—made a point to emphasize that he didn’t create it to measure just anyone. As his biography on Verywell Mind puts it, “Binet [believed] that such measures of intelligence were not always generalizable and could only apply to children with similar backgrounds and experiences.”
Upon finding all this out, I began to wonder how IQ became widely understood as the de facto standard for measuring all of a person’s mind. This led me to immigration lawyer and Anti-Eugenics Project member Ajitha Reddy, who revealed the answer is the same as the reason many studies have been appropriated for purposes they were never intended for: eugenics.
Binet’s statements against using his measurement as a general intelligence test didn’t stop eugenicist Henry H. Goddard from taking advantage of IQ for his own gain.
In an article for DePaul Law Review, Reddy writes: “Goddard used a perversion of Binet’s intelligence scale to rank those he considered feebleminded into varying degrees of mental incompetence… Goddard found morons wherever he looked: criminals, alcoholics, [sex workers], and anyone ’incapable of adapting themselves to their environment and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly.’ Most immigrants also fit this classification.”
Fundamentally, I think that trying to put a single number to any aspect of a person is a terrible idea. It undermines all the various parts of a person that that number tries to summarize.
I’ve observed that it also puts immense pressure on anyone on either end of the spectrum of IQ. If one has a high IQ, then they’re immediately deemed as a prodigy destined for greatness and will consequently yearn to live up to that preconception. If one has a lower-than-average IQ, then they will doubtless feel the need to “prove themself” and thereby push towards goals that aren’t healthy for anyone to feel pressured to reach. It’s a lose-lose situation.
IQ isn’t alone in being wholly inept at what it’s used for. The AMA Journal of Ethics has a good article on Body Mass Index’s history—a measurement equally drenched in eugenics.
Moreover, the SAT hardly scores what it was meant to. According to PBS, the SAT was initially branded as the “Scholastic Aptitude Test, the word ‘aptitude’ meaning that the test measured an innate ability, rather than knowledge acquired through schooling.” The article also goes into depth about how it doesn’t do that.
And, of course, the SAT also can be traced back to eugenics. The National Education Association wrote about Carl Brigam, who was known for claiming that “African-Americans were on the low end of the racial, ethnic, and/or cultural spectrum.” He later went on to be directly commissioned by the College Board to develop the SAT.
Although the primary focus of this article is IQ, I hope those brief examples can paint a fuller picture about aptitude tests as a whole. I hope they help you to see the line that can be traced directly from the desire to summarize human beings to one of the most twisted and deep-rooted pseudosciences in the modern world.
Humanity’s existence is a miracle, and boiling that miracle down to a single number does us a grave disservice. We should instead accept that human beings are complicated and multifaceted creatures, and let that guide how we consider their abilities.
Sources:
https://www.verywellmind.com/alfred-binet-biography-2795503
https://antieugenicsproject.org/presenters/ajitha-reddy/
https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=law-review
https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/archived-news/2014/02/what-your-iq-score-doesn-t-tell-you.html
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-use-bmi-fetishizes-white-embodiment-and-racializes-fat-phobia/2023-07
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing