When Intelligence Passes the Test
Havender, William R.
"When Intelligence Passes the Test" One hardly ever hears of a Moslem abandoning Islam for another faith. There is no instance of a country being de-Islamized the way the Middle East and North Africa were totally...
...Readers fortunate enough to be acquainted with Hayek's writings will recognize here an instance of the distinction Hayek draws between "methodological individualism" and "methodological collectivism...
...The answer is no, for the simple reason that Soviet Central Asia has a large number of Russians and Ukrainians concentrated in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan where modernization has gone farthest...
...The gains are, however, the same for both races, that is, the mean difference between groups is not reduced...
...One such experiment was described in these pages, March, 1978...
...Despite this laudable history, there remained a detail that gives nourishment to the current attack on mental tests...
...There are many such "expectations...
...This is the salient distinction between the current debate and its predecessor where, you remember, there did exist a means of readily showing the superior academic capabilities of substantial numbers of people being excluded by the then-prevailing methods...
...It must not be forgotten that the unwillingness to permit group properties to fluctuate as the dependent outcome of individually fair treatment must have the unfair treatment of individuals as its concomitant...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 13 differences in the pattern of responses to the specific items that make up a given test...
...Moreover, differences in g also correlate to a fair degree with differences in performance in areas that most of us would agree are unarguably of social importance, such as scholastic achievement, and occupational level and earnings...
...I t is not without cause that mental tests have become one of the most hotly debated social issues of the past decade, for, along with other closely related measures of academic achievement, they guard the gates to academic advancement in the current scheme of things, and hence play an important role in determining who gets ahead...
...For one, there is the manifest intent not to strengthen the use of demonstrated merit in allocating academic opportunities but to replace it by political allocation (which means, of course, allocation by intimidation...
...Bias might show up, for example, in a group difference in the rank order of test item difficulty or in the "factorial structure" of a given test (this is a technical way of analyzing test results so as to isolate the various components of mental ability that account for them...
...That children get smarter as they get older is, of course, so commonplace and incontestable that it is the foundation of school curricula the world over...
...And tests that distinguish among children of d i f f e r e n t ages also distinguish among children of the same age, and also among adults...
...In the Balkans several cities retain an Islamic way of life long after Turkey's withdrawal...
...For if one holds that any manifest differences in group "merit" are spurious, then groups currently overrepresented in the economic and educational elites must inevitably be early t a r g e t s for r e d i s t r i b u t i o n , since they cannot have earned these exalted positions...
...It is the easily demonstrated commonality of g to performance both on mental t e s t s and in the more obviously socially and educationally important tasks that makes these tests useful for predicting later success...
...The usual questions that laymen ask are thoroughly discussed, not least important of which are: Do mental tests really measure true intelligence, and does what they measure have much significance for life in the real world...
...Virtually all of the popular criticisms of mental tests have been scrutinized in empirical studies and ruled out...
...That horror now confronts us, and "unbudgeably unconcerned" is certainly an apt, if too mild, description of the p r e s e n t a t t i t u d e of most of those who worked to bring it about...
...The overall prediction is thereby significantly improved over aptitude tests alone...
...tMacmillan, $29.95...
...But while the correlations between IQ or aptitude tests and actual scholastic achievement are substantial, they are far from perfect: about .6 to .7 (on a scale from 0 to 1) at the elementary school level, declining to around .4 to .5 at the college level.~ This leaves ample room for our experiential impression that self-discipline and plain old-fashioned Sitzfleisch make a big contribution to actual levels of performance...
...And the flip side of this belief is the eager assent to the pernicious proposition that if a group average difference ever were one day demonstrated in an incontestable manner, then the entire structure of liberal democracy would come tumbling down, and we would have no further d e f e n s e s against r e i n s t i t u t i n g racially segregated schools and a South Africa-like allocation of jobs on ethnic, racial, and religious grounds...
...on the collective level, to the inevitable escalation of social divisiveness as groups wrangle over the distribution of desirable positions...
...The received wisdom has been that the allocation of academic opportunities over the last decades has been made largely on the basis of demonstrated talent and competence, and that mental tests are a superior tool, indeed the best single one we have, for ferreting beneath the veneer of social class, race, and ethnicity to reveal occluded capabilities...
...One could argue, for example, that the cultural deprivation affects not only test performance but also performance on the judgment criterion to the very same degree (thus accounting for the similar predictive validities), and that the cultural effect acts uniformly on every test item (hence accounting for the similarity between groups in rank order of item difficulty and factorial structures), and that the culturereduced items and tests, no matter how superficially culture-free they appear, simply haven't got at the deeper sources of cultural bias...
...For groups consist only of the individuals that compose them, and bave no moral standing apart from that of their component persons...
...What, for example, would we actually set out to do to make group differences vanish, if we still prefer in the face of-this mass of evidence a cultural interpretation of group disparities...
...The work comprises both a lengthy introduction to the theory and methodology of mental test construction (including an explanation at a simple level of the statistical tools one needs to understand how psychometricians think), as well as a comprehensive, detailed review of the enormous research literature pertaining to the question of bias...
...A simple way to begin answering the first of these questions is to take a situation where there isn't any doubt about there being greater or lesser amounts of what in everyday life we mean by intelligence, for instance, by testing children at different ages, to see if tests can distinguish between their differing mental capabilities...
...perhaps each person should be examined by a member of his own race...
...It is also worth noting that although Islam proclaimed itself a religion of the sword it won adherents wherever it competed peacefully with other religions...
...Would it be legitimate to predict that once Communism loses its ruthlessness the incompatibility between Islam and modernization would make itself felt, and some religious leader would recapitulate in Samarkand, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, what the Ayatollah Khomeini has done in Teheran...
...Islam is also winning Negro adherents not only in Africa but in Christian America despite the fact that the slave trade in Africa was for a long time an Islamic monopoly...
...Seven centuries after its expulsion from Spain the flavor of Islam is tangible in Spanish life...
...It is in fact rather easy to see where vagueness about the alternatives is liable to lead us: on an individual level, to many destroyed careers among otherwise meritorious people, and to an overall weakening of incentives to accumulate good marks for merit of all kinds...
...But this constantly rearguard, post hoe sort of hypothesizing, unable ever to generate a robust, empirically verifiable prediction proving the existence of overlooked ability, begins to wear a little thin in the face of the overwhelming marshaling of mutually supportive evidence contained in Jensen's book...
...The matter of greatest interest apropos the question of bias is of course whether the predictive validity varies for different social groups...
...There are about 70 million Moslems in Soviet Central Asia...
...But the original study purporting to prove this failed to stand up under scrutiny, and a dozen attempts to repeat it were all without success...
...Nor are the critics of tests willing to abide by the outcome of any conceivable practical demonstration...
...Other factors besides test content have been thought to have significant influences on test scores...
...This poses a problem only if one believes that parity in group-average statistics is the proper barometer to monitor in making inferences about social justice...
...The faculty signified by g is, basically, the ability to "educe relations and correlates," that is, to infer relationships from a set of specifics and to apply such generalizations to new specifics...
...Csan Communism modernize an Islamic country...
...Differences in g can be shown to be related to differences in performance on a wide variety of specific tasks_9 Its g e n e r a l i t y shows up, for example, in the way that all mental tests of any complexity (and there are a great many) correlate highly with one another (that is, a person doing well on one tends to do well on the others, too...
...That is, however, just how intelligence tests were originally validated...
...Perhaps, then, the use of standard English in these tests is the cause of difficulty for ghetto-raised blacks...
...There exists a massive collection of findings bearing on these sensitive measures of bias, most of them relating to differences between blacks and whites, and, writes Jensen, they "quite unequivocally either fail to support, or else diametrically contradict, the expectations that follow from the hypothesis that most current standard tests of mental ability are culturally biased for American-born blacks...
...There are other, more sophisticated ways of detecting test bias that look for ~;Such tests are of course not used by themselves in determining college or graduate admissions, but in conjunction with previous grades, recommendations, and other considerations...
...Certainly, vast numbers of blacks, and newly-immigrant Jews, Asians, and Slavs thus got the chance to become "gentlemen" long before they routinely started being born that way...
...There is no instance of a country being de-Islamized the way the Middle East and North Africa were totally de-Christianized...
...Too, much has been popularly written about the "Pygmalion effect": the influence a teacher's expectation of his or her student's ability might have on a child's performance on an IQ test...
...But Jensen's review of the literature concerning whether practice or even direct coaching in test strategy can raise test scores finds only modest gains, mainly for persons who have had little or no prior test experience at all (an unlikely situation for college applicants...
...But in fact mean group differences are increased on such items and tests...
...One is the race of the examiner...
...This means that whatever group ratio results from the just treatment of t t T h a t Jews have won extraordinary standing is well known, but it is not well known that the Asians have, for example, won election to the National Academy of Sciences in a ratio ten times their proportion in the general population...
...There is, then, an impressive concurrence of evidence coming out of an enormous array of varied studies supporting the conclusion that obvious differences in the "culture" presupposed by standardized tests, or any other source of bias in the t e s t s , do not account for group average differences for persons born in this country and speaking English...
...The mosques and shrines are packed with worshipers and the Islamic way of life persists...
...The faculty whose differences are made evident by this means is what laymen mean by "intelligence" and what psychometricians call g (for general mental ability...
...These sorts of data can of course never fully exclude the bias hypothesis, because it is always possible to reformulate it to accommodate whatever empirical data are adduced...
...Mean group differences, then, do seem, on the basis of the available evidence, to be the outcome of evaluative procedures that at the level of individuals are as fair as we can now make them...
...For example, if variations between group means are caused by the cultural content of tests, then one would expect group differences to be reduced on items and tests that are purely abstract...
...Most of the studies compare whites and blacks, and, after an exhaustive review of this evidence, Jensen concludes "that tests' predictive validities are actually the same for blacks and whites, and probably for other native-born, Englishspeaking groups as well [although the data p e r t a i n i n g to the l a t t e r are relatively scant} . . . . the little bias tbat has been found in some studies has been in a direction that actually favors the selection of blacks when the selection procedure is colorblind...
...The problem vanishes, however, as soon as one understands that group averages are not the proper statistic to watch in judging the degree of a pluralistic society's justice...
...Were this the case today, the remedy would be simple, in fact the same as before: adopt the alternative means as the standard...
...And the problem is insoluble...
...Perhaps the tests are biased in favor of certain social groups, with the bias lying not at such a blatant level as unfair grading, but in the sorts of questions asked and the kinds of experieoces and cultural knowledge presupposed...
...This is the recurrent finding that, though members of all ethnic, religious, and socio-economic groups are found throughout the grade distribution when such tests are given to large, representative samples of the citizenry, they are not found in constant proportions at all levels...
...Another expectation is that the group on which a test has been standardized would necessarily have the greatest cultural affinity for the test items, hence would do the best, whereas the fact is that minority groups are distributed on both sides of the "norm' ': Jews, Americanborn Asians, Eskimos, and Japanese-bornand-raised Japanese do better on tests normed on American whites ,than do American whites...
...But this is nonsense, as Hayek pointed out two decades ago in The Constitution of Liberty: To rest the case fbr equal treatment of nauonal or racial minorities on the assertion that they do not differ from other men is implicitly to admit that factual inequality would justify unequal treatment, and the proof that some differences do, in fact, exist would not be long in forthcoming...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 15...
...It is not obvious, and indeed, in its current etiolated form the cultural bias interpretation is far less able to generate effective policy prescriptions for reducing individual and group differences in achievement--which after all is what really matters--than its diametric opposite, the hypothesis of the genetic causation of group differences (a matter I took up at length in these pages in April, 1976...
...individuals must be a fair one...
...ents...
...For another, there is that exaggerated sensitivity to any hint that there might be some measure of justice in the current system...
...As things are now it seems that the Communist ability to modernize an Islamic society may eventually be tested in Afghanistan and Southern Yemen, under the eyes of fanatical Islamic neighbors...
...The characteristic feature of this debate is the test critics' compulsive focus on "anecdotal" deviations-from-perfection in the application of standardized tests, oddly contrasted with a vast, yawning silence concerning the feasible alternatives, find an unbudgeable unconcern with the outcome when alternatives are tried out...
...Finally, it is curious that Christianity, a champion of the meek, o f " the weak things of the world," made its greatest headway among the warrior tribes of Europe while Islam appeals to victors and victims alike...
...Readers not so graced will still recognize this as no more than the familiar philosophy of merit that happily, though precariously, is still officially espoused in this land...
...It was precisely the availability of this alternative means of demonstrating academic capability that gave both compelling plausibility and moral force to the movement to base admissions on objectively measured merit...
...William R. Havender WHEN INTELLIGENCE PASSES THE TEST The bias in mental tests is all in the criticizing of them...
...The outcome typically has been that no founts of achievement were uncovered beyond what was already predicted by the usual means...
...It is this limited question that Arthur Jensen examines in his massive new book, Bias in Mental Testing.~ No more than a brief sampling of its argument will be attempted here...
...Hence, the David Levine drawing in the May 1, 1980, New York Review of Books depicting ArthurJensen in what looks like storm-trooper regalia is slander pure and simple, although such is not out of character for that tabloid...
...It is entirely inadequate to convey the sense of its empirical thoroughness and its theoretical sophistication, and the e x t r a o r d i n a r y 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 coherence with which it ties t o g e t h e r the many independent lines of investigation supporting the fairness of these tests in evaluating the mental capabilities of individuals, at least for members of native-born, English-speaking groups...
...And like that previous debate, there are clearly deeper motivations at work...
...And there is an elementary reason why one should understand this...
...Christianity and Islam arrived simultaneously in Indonesia...
...Predictably, this component of the "merit system" has drawn critics the way ripe meat draws William R. Havender is a research biochemist at the University of California at Berkeley and a contributing editor to Regulation magazine...
...flies, critics who cannot abide any residual trace of that special moral validation that once characterized the American political experiment...
...In this past decade of affirmative action, it has happened many times that large numbers of students have been admitted in place of others that did satisfy the normal criteria, with disproportionate amounts of teaching and tutorial resources expended to nurture any faintest flicker of scholastic ability...
...And while the data are not yet available, it is likely that the median of West Indian blacks and Cubans in this country will be at 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 least as high as that of whites...
...This is an old fight, one that clearly shall have to be fought and won again...
...More important, pad passu as the "cultural" determinants of differential group performance become ever more elusive, they become ever more useless for inspiring specific policy initiatives...
...Although the Communists have broken the power of the Ulema, Islam's caste of scholars and priests, and are modernizing industry and agriculture at breakneck speed, the vigor of Islam has remained undiminished...
...But blacks do r e l a t i v e l y b e t t e r on verbal tests written in standard English than on nonverbal tests...
...Despite the differing characters of the questions being debated, one cannot r e f r a i n from noting this parallel, both in order to assess the balance of credibility in the current flap over mental tests and by way of warning about the absolute necessity of knowing in advance what we will use in place of mental tests for ascertaining merit...
...This has been looked at in more than thirty studies, the results of which conclusively contradict the hypothesis...
...T h i s is a very brief overview of the contents of this book...
...In Russia, the continuity with the Tartar khanate is evident in every department of life...
...The reaction of these critics, however, has not been to pause and perhaps think, but to vilify those who would point out the factual nudity of their hypothesis...
...This would have only a limited impact on the white gentile majority (since they would lose on average no more than 10 to 20 percent of the positions they now hold), but the impact on such minorities as the Jews and Asians would be devastati n g . t t Regardless of intent, the effect of this social view will assuredly be antiSemitic...
...Even when, as in Spain, the Balkans, and Russia, Islam was driven out by force, its imprint has endured...
...experience with tests, and hence in their "testwiseness...
...moreover, translation of the Stanford-Bluet test into black ghetto dialect produced no significant difference...
...Even under Communism, Tartar khans are ensconced in the Kremlin...
...How good are these predictions ? Mental testers use the term "predictive validity" to measure how successful a test is in predicting performance on any criterion of interest (typically, scholastic or job performance...
...The reader will recall that during the later stages of the war we were supposed to focus our critical attention only on the petty bribery of the Thieu regime and on American "war crimes" and never for an instant on the possibility that the only feasible alternative would be a horror of catastrophic proportions...
...Such "norming bias" cannot, then, be a general explanation of mean group disparities...
...That is, the items are selected so that the cultural content is typically of such wide familiarity that it contributes negligibly to whether one gets the item right or wrong...
...But no method yet exists that has been demonstrated to be s u p e r i o r in d e t e c t i n g hidden academic abilities, and the sole animating force now in the movement against s t a n d a r d i z e d tests is the disparity in group means...
...This is a sorry tale, and it is a dreadful sign of the times that those who favor individual assessment without regard to one's ethnicity, religion, or race are now forced to argue for the reality of group differences, while those who abominate the distribution of rewards in proportion to proven individual merit and shamelessly prefer making one's chances conditional upon.ethnicity have managed to gull much of the media, in particular certain New York editors, into granting them the halo of virtue...
...The lesson coming out of that old and noble battle was that we should assess individuals and let the group ratios fall where they may, even when this results, as it puzzlingly did, in a worrisome under-representation of white Protestants, upon whom these new measures had largely been validated...
...A tell-tale feature of the current attack on standardized testing is the lack of any demonstrably better alternative for making merit allocations...
...Historically, the introduction of standardized mental tests was a liberating revolution relative to what went before, and they were successful in displacing the old ways largely because they made it easy to show that the then-usual means of distributing access to educational opportunities-in the South, by means of race, and in the rest of the country, by means of having attended the right prep schools, having recommendations from the right kinds of Protestant family ministers, and having alumni as relatives--were systematically overlooking many academically superior students...
...But if true, this lends a measure of desert to the way rewards are distributed in American society...
...This a t t i t u d e is all too familiar from o t h e r debates of the past two decades, including the debate over Vietnam...
...The Moslem population is shy of factories and sticks to the countryside...
...There is, of course, a wide overlap in all of these distributions, and it is a generally overlooked virtue of standardized tests that by thus demonstrating the interblending of mental ability between different groups, they refute rather than affirm the typological thinking that has historically been thefons et origo of the archetypes of racism, such as the official treatment of the Jews in Hitler's Germany and the blacks in this country until the past few decades_9 Now one might speculate about the cause of these differences in group averages, and an obvious place to begin is to examine the measuring instrument itself to see if it is giving accurate readings...
...some inequalities in income, prestige, and, yes, access to writing opportunities could then be said to be deserved...
...The Portuguese were as zealous as the Arabs, but today Indonesia is largely Islamic...
...It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different...
...Specifically, the central tendency of both Asians and Jews is above that of gentile whites, and that of the latter above that of blacks...
...Yet another idea was that groups differed in their previous * ' I t is not really surprising that these t e s t s ' dependence on culture-specific content is so low, because despite the superficial appearance of some items, the denotative content of items on tests of IQ or aptitude (as distinct from achievement tests) is used merely as a vehicle for the reasoning problem being posed...
...According to Jensen, the results of the "thousands of studies of the correlation between intelligence test scores and scholastic performance" are so "generally consistent and statistically incontestable _9 . . that even the harshest critics . . .wholly concede the substantial r e l a t i o n s h i p between IQ and scholastic achievement...
...Too, the central tendency of higher socio-economic groups is above that of lower socio-economic groups, that of Southern whites below that of Northern whites, and that of California Hispanics between those of whites and blacks...
...Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, are "Russian towns set down in the center of Asia...
Vol. 13 • June 1980 • No. 6
