What Ever Became of "Geniuses"?

Downplaying the old IQ numbers racket

Though Actress Judy Holliday specialized in playing dumb blondes, legend has it that she possessed a towering 172 IQ. Spiro Agnew says his is 135, which puts him well into the ranks of the intellectually superior. South Korea's Kim Ung-Yong, a 14-year-old prodigy who was speaking four languages and solving integral calculus problems at age four, is said to tip the mental scales at 210, worth a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. Even Yankee Slugger Reggie Jackson brags as much about his IQ (he claims a 160) as his B.A. (his 1977 batting average was a solid .286).

Poor Reggie--nobody is all that impressed any more. The day is long past when the IQ was revered as some sort of magic number, affixed during childhood as an indelible, immutable badge of mental prowess or dullness. Instead, the whole IQ concept is under suspicion. Many school systems, including those in California and New York City, have abandoned IQ testing altogether. College admissions officers have little use for them. Neither do such competitive organizations as NASA, IBM or Phi Beta Kappa.

It was 72 years ago when a French psychologist named Alfred Binet first devised a test that attempted to measure a child's intelligence. Seeking a way to distinguish truly retarded students from laggards with hidden ability, Binet developed a series of exercises involving completion of pictures and the assembling of objects, as well as problems in math, vocabulary and reasoning. To score the test, an equation was devised that divided a child's mental age--as determined by the test --by his chronological age, thus producing an "intelligence quotient." If a six-year-old child was thinking like most other six-year-olds, for example, his IQ was 100. If he was thinking like an eight-year-old, his IQ was 133.

Today, close to 200 different tests are in use. They attempt primarily to gauge four abilities: verbal and numerical skills, spatial relations and reasoning. Of the four best-known tests (see chart), the Stanford-Binet is the closest to Binet's original; it takes as long as 1 1/2 hrs., is administered to students individually, and results in a single IQ score. The Wechsler test, also given individually, reports an IQ score for both its verbal and nonverbal sections, as well as an overall figure. The Otis-Lennon, a group test, measures "general intelligence." (Sample question from the version for ten-year-olds: "What is the opposite of 'easy'?") The Culture Fair Intelligence Test concentrates more on the interpretation of diagrams; to avoid any cultural bias inherent in language, it employs no verbal questions at all.

A score of 100 is still the norm in today's tests, although none of them use Binet's quotient formula. Instead, since scores were found to distribute themselves along a bell curve--centered at 100--individual IQs are now measured in standard deviations along such a curve. In the tests, about 68% score between 85 and 115; less than 3% score below 70--or above 130. Because scores fluctuate widely in the high IQ range, researchers have scrapped the designation genius (once defined as 140 level or above). Now they prefer more subtle terms like superior and very superior. Because terminology differs from one test to another, anyone with a 120 score on the Wechsler test is designated superior, while the same score rates only above average on the Otis-Lennon.

The more tests that are devised, the more educators seem to doubt their validity. For one thing, individual IQ scores are known to vary considerably. The IQs of children, for example, can change 17 points to 20 points up or down before the age of 18, and there is sometimes a marked change from one year to the next. Many experts even question how much IQ scores have to do with intelligence. Few support Harvard Psychologist Richard Herrnstein's position that intelligence is primarily an innate ability, rather than an evolving capacity resulting from the interplay of mental quickness and environmental conditioning. It is also possible that such personal traits as drive and persistence--factors that IQ tests cannot measure--are as important as inherent reasoning ability. Furthermore, most psychologists agree that the tests are biased in favor of middle-class children (blacks as a group score 15 points lower than whites). And there is a persistent danger that an IQ may become a labeling device. One Florida teacher gave his students more challenging assignments after noticing numbers ranging from 130 to 160 after their names; only later did he discover that they were locker numbers.

In consequence, straight IQ tests are being gradually abandoned in favor of tests that claim merely to measure academic ability. McGraw-Hill, for example, is quietly retiring its old standby, the California Test of Mental Maturity, to avoid "identifying a child with a fixed number." Instead, the firm is promoting a new Short Form Test of Academic Aptitude. It reports verbal and nonverbal scores separately, rather than one intelligence quotient--although a mental-age score is still available upon request.

The only point on which educators generally agree is that IQ tests do seem to be fairly reliable forecasters of future academic success. As for Reggie Jackson and other proud bearers of high IQs, they can still seek gratification in several exclusive societies. The international Mensa society accepts only applicants who can prove they scored in the top 2% on any standard IQ test (among its 32,000 fellows: Isaac Asimov and F. Lee Bailey). The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry is even more select: its members, who now number more than 100, must rank in the 99.9 percentile.

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