Cordially Suspicious
Ever since my senior year at Azusa High School, class of 1972, I have been cordially suspicious of intelligence tests.
Prior to that I bought into the idea that there was something scientific about this measure of the mind. I assumed that dispassionate scientists, in cooperation with educational experts, designed tests that could gauge a kid’s smarts and translate it into a number.
Then, during that senior year one of our teachers, a wild-eyed radical who evidently raided some supersecret filing cabinet and wasn’t worried about future employment, decided to reveal our IQ scores to us, but only if we truly wanted to see them. And he warned us – we might not like what we learned.
In that era before kids could graduate early and/ or start taking college classes my friends and I would sit around in the Senior Lounge and play cards, read books, and talk, because we’d finished our requirements but still had to hang around school all day. We were known as the Smart Group, which in that era before computers transformed nerds into geeks, made us very unpopular. So unpopular that once we took possession of the treasured Senior Lounge no one else would go near the place.
Anyway, all of us in the Smart Group wanted to know our scores. Since we were told to keep it a secret naturally we rushed back to the Senior Lounge so we could compare scores. I had a fairly high IQ even though I mostly got B’s and C’s, probably because I didn’t try very hard. Some of my friends got scores that were much higher, but they were geniuses. Besides, I had already received a very high SAT score, got into the college of my choice, and no longer cared about my high school grades.
But one of our friends was miserable. She was a straight A student, obviously one of the smartest people I knew. But her IQ score was under a hundred. She was one those people who don’t test well. I explained that to her, but I could see she didn’t believe me
Tests are tools, but they are not gods. They’re flawed, geared to people with certain backgrounds (the same as those who design the tests) and they only give us one side of the picture. Once I started writing Sunday School curriculum I learned there are at least eight different kinds of intelligence, and a lot of them are difficult to measure.
Recently I’ve begun to rely on hearing aids, and I’ve discovered something else – when I tell people to repeat something, adding, “It’s not your fault. I’m hard of hearing.” my IQ score drops dramatically in their eyes. They start speaking louder, and slower, and simpler. No big words. In their eyes I become something of a curiosity, an object of pity, almost a pet. My inability to remember to put in my hearing aids evidently affects my IQ.
Worse things could happen. Its kind of a relief, not having to live up to people’s expectations that I know something. And the nice thing is, when I do spout off with something clever, their eyes grow wide and they’re really impressed. But they still don’t think I’m smart. They assume I’ve learned a trick, like that horse that does math by stomping his feet, or the dog that howls along with a song in an attempt to sing.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up on a Youtube video or something. With a title like, “You’d Swear He Really Knows What He’s Talking About.”