it. What about physical intelligence, conversational intelligence,social intelligence, survival intelligence, and the slew of others thatgo into everyday life? Why are these important traits not figured intointelligence tests? Granted, normal standardized tests certainly getpredictable results where academics are concerned, but they should notbe considered good indicators of general intelligence because of theglaring omissions they make in the testing process. To really gauge aperson’s intelligence, it would be necessary to put them through arigorous set of real-life trials and document their performance. Otherwise the standardized IQ tests of today are testing an extremelylimited quality of a person’s character that can hardly be referred toas intelligence.For the sake of brevity, I will quickly mention a few other commoncriticisms of modern IQ tests. They have no way to compensate forcultural differences. People use different methods to solve problems. People’s reading strategies differ. Speed is not always the best way totackle a problem. There is often too much emphasis placed onvocabulary. Each of these points warrants individual treatment, and formore information refer to The Triarchic Mind by RJ Sternberg (PenguinBooks, 1988, p18-36).It is possible to classify all the reasons that IQ tests fail at theirtask into two main groups. The first grouping is where the tests assumetoo much. Examples of this flaw are the assumption that speed is alwaysgood, vocabulary is a good indicator of intelligence, and that differenttest taking environments won’t affect the outcome. The second groupingcomes because the tests gauge the wrong items. Examples of this aredifferent culture groups being asked to take the same tests as everyoneelse, and the fact that the tests ignore so many types of intelligence(like physical, social, etc). These two groupings illustrate where themajor failings of popular IQ tests occur and can be u...
