According to Gould, Kamin, and other critics of psychometrics, if I recall correctly, IQ tests were introduced on a large scale in the US in WWI to test and sort soldiers; the results were then used in the immigration debates leading to the anti-immigration laws of the 1920s, and then became legitimated in the social scientific and public mind as a measure of "intelligence" rather than a limited tool to identify learning-disabled kids. Their use in sorting, ranking, and normalizing (to use the Foucauldian terms) the population is intimately tied up with "aptitude" testing (the SAT, LSAT, GRE, GMAT, etc.) and the rise of ETS after World War II. And now of course we have a federal mandate, No Child Left Untested, guaranteeing that only subjects that will be tested will be taught.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> B. wrote:
> > When did they become valid predictors of success
> in
> > "white collar" fields?
> >
> > IQ tests were designed to test for mental
> retardation
> > for adolescent age kids in schools.
> >
> > Pop culturally, they've become pissing contests.
> >
> > -B.
>
> This is a well establishing finding. One relevant
> meta-analysis:
>
> Hunter, J.E. and Hunter, R.F. (1984). Validity and
> utility of alternate
> predictors of job performance. Psychological
> Bulletin, 96(1):72-98.
>
> If you go back to Binet around 1900, yes, his test
> was originally
> developed to identify children with "learning
> problems". However,
> shortly after that, in the early 1900s,
> psychometricians like Terman
> began arguing that IQ score = intelligence in the
> general population.
>
> Miles
>
>
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