The Story of Psychology (122 page)

Binet’s aim in developing intelligence tests, early in the century, was to benefit both the children and society by determining which children needed special education. Similarly, psychological and employment tests have always been basically diagnostic, meant to benefit the people being tested and those who deal with them. The extraordinary expansion of testing in the past several decades is evidence that it does serve these purposes. Testing is, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern society; schools, universities, large industries, government, and the military would be crippled and all but inoperable if they were suddenly deprived of the information they gain from it.

Yet testing can lend itself to misuse, the most serious example being the favoring of certain racial and economic groups and the handicapping of others. The obvious case in point is the effect of testing on the educational and employment opportunities of whites as compared with blacks, Hispanics, and other disadvantaged groups.

To people with an unqualified hereditarian view of human abilities, the use of intelligence and achievement tests poses no ethical problem. They believe that middle- and upper-class people do better on such tests, on the average, than lower-class people simply because they are better intellectually endowed by nature. As we saw, the followers of Galton were convinced that heredity accounts for the differences between the average scores on IQ and other mental tests of people of different classes and races. It was on this basis that schools throughout the country began testing students fairly early in the century and placing the higher-scoring in academic programs and the lower-scoring in “vocational” programs, thus preparing students for what were taken to be their manifest stations in life.

If that reasoning were correct, such testing and placement would be not only fair but in the best interests of the individuals and of society. But what if the test scores reflect the influence of environment? What if poverty and social disadvantage prevent children and adults from developing their latent abilities, causing them to score lower than those from favored backgrounds? If that is the case, the use of test scores to measure supposedly innate ability and to determine each individual’s educational and employment opportunities is a grave injustice and a major source of social inequity.

Time and again, for more than sixty years, controversy has raged over the extent to which the scores of IQ and other cognitive ability tests measure innate abilities and the extent to which they reflect life experience
. But it became clear in recent decades that the data used by both hereditarian and environmentalist psychologists, chiefly derived from cross-sectional samples (samples of people of different ages), did not adequately explain the processes observed by Piaget and other developmental psychologists. Longitudinal studies tracing the course of development in individuals revealed that nature and nurture are not static, fixed components but are interactive and highly variable over time. At any point in life, an individual’s intellectual and emotional development is the product of the continuing interaction of his or her experiences and innate capabilities.

Then, too, most developmentalists have come to believe that different genotypes are affected to different degrees by environment; each has its own “reaction range.” As Irving Gottesman, emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, has explained, an individual with mongolism may, in an enriched environment, attain a level of intellectual development only modestly higher than he would in a restricted poor environment; an individual with the hereditary equipment of a genius may, in an excellent environment, reach a level of development very much higher than he would in a poor environment.
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Thus, at low levels of innate ability the influence of environment is far less than it is at high levels.

Such generalizations, however, tell us only about categories, not about the relative influences of nature and nurture on any one person; there are too many idiosyncratic and incalculable factors in each person’s history to permit analysis of the relative roles of heredity and environment on the individual’s development. It is therefore impossible, at least at present, to precisely determine innate intellectual ability from an individual’s test scores.

That being so, how can testing be used to determine schooling and job placement without unfairly benefiting privileged middle-class persons and unfairly penalizing the disadvantaged? The answer, so far, has been to control testing by political and legal means. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its amendments gave minority and other disadvantaged groups a legal toehold from which to attack testing as discriminatory and to demand remedial action. They challenged educational and employment tests in court, sometimes successfully, on the grounds that some of the materials are familiar to whites but not to most minority groups and, more broadly, that minority groups, particularly blacks and Hispanics, grow up under such social disadvantages that any test, even one based on symbols rather than words and ostensibly “culture fair,” is unfair.

The radical remedy demanded by some activist groups at the height of the civil rights ferment in the 1960s was the abandonment of testing, and, as mentioned earlier, in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles city administrations actually banned intelligence testing in the elementary schools.
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But the opponents of testing had majority power only in a few large cities, and in any case placing slow learners and the handicapped in the same classrooms as normal and gifted children so slowed down the education of the latter group that the efforts to eliminate testing soon failed.

Similar attacks on the use of college qualifying tests were made by some civil rights activists and groups. Ralph Nader, for one, charged in 1980 that the SATs discriminate against minority students, most of whom come from culturally impoverished backgrounds. Complaints and pressure against the SATs continued. Spokespersons for minorities have lately kept up a drumfire of charges against the SAT, claiming among other things that analogies used in the test are culture-bound and unfair to students with nonwhite, non-middle-class backgrounds, as are certain items using special, class-related words like “regatta,” and that the readers who grade a new writing section in the SAT are likely to emphasize stylistically and grammatically Standard English, marking students down whose style employs idioms, phrases, or word patterns more common to communities of color. The College Board vigorously denies all of these charges, asserting that there is no research indicating that analogy questions are culturally biased, that data about the use of “regatta” show that minority students found the question using it no more difficult than did white students, and that the English teachers who read the essays “are trained to ignore errors in grammar, spelling, or punctuation until those errors are so bad as to get in the way of making sense of the student’s argument.”
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The jury is still out.

In the realm of employment testing, activists scored a major success, at least temporarily. The General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB), which measures a number of cognitive abilities and some aspects of manual dexterity, was developed in the 1940s by the U.S. Employment Service and was long used by that bureau and many of its state and local offices as the basis of referrals to employers. But the average GATB scores of minority groups were well below those of the majority groups, so if test scores resulted in, say, 20 percent of whites being referred for a particular job, only 3 percent of blacks and 9 percent of Hispanics might be referred for the same job.

The amended Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use the scores in this way, not because the tests failed to measure abilities wanted by employers but because national policy required giving the disadvantaged compensatory advantages.
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Rulings by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a number of court decisions led to a solution known as “within-group norming” or “race norming.” Under this policy, test takers were referred for jobs not on the basis of their raw scores but according to where they ranked within their own racial or ethnic group. A black who scored in the eighty-fifth percentile of black test takers would be put on an equal footing with a white who scored in the eighty-fifth percentile of the whites, even though the black’s score was lower than the white’s. A black with the same score as a white would be rated higher than the white.
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In the 1980s the employment services of thirty-eight states used race norming, some more than others. Employers, by and large, went along with the method, mainly because it helped them meet government affirmative action requirements.

Some psychologists attacked race norming as a travesty of testing and a distortion of the test’s measure of job fitness,
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and political conservatives attacked it as an illegal “quota” system, unfair to whites. A 1989 study by a committee of the National Research Council backed race norming but recommended that the Employment Service base job referrals not only on the GATB but on the applicant’s experience, skills, and education. The committee saw the merit of both sides in the dispute:

The race-norming question was a hot potato in the congressional debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1991. In the struggle to pass an act that President George H. W. Bush would not veto, congressmen who favored race norming had to yield to those who opposed it. The act as finally passed prohibited “test score adjustment” on the basis of race, and the practice has since been banned at all eighteen hundred state and local offices of the Employment Service.

How one views this matter—whether one considers referring job applicants on the basis of race norming a proper use or a misuse of testing—depends on one’s political philosophy.

We will spare ourselves a thorough review of the many other ways in which testing of one kind or another is, or can be, misused by opportunistic, misguided, inept, or extremist individuals. But three particularly suspect uses are worth noting:

Dumbing down:
In the 1980s, when minority groups were militantly fighting against testing, one “solution” to the alleged unfairness of pre-employment tests was to revise them or modify their scoring so as to upgrade the scores of minority test takers. An example: In 1984 the Golden Rule Insurance Company of Indianapolis agreed not to use any tests in which the average scores of blacks were more than 10 percent lower than those of whites. In 1985 the state of Alabama reached a settlement under which it would not use teacher certification tests that produced differences greater than 5 to 10 percent between whites and blacks. In other cases, the solution has been to make the tests so easy that everyone can pass: In the early 1990s Texas gave a teacher examination that nearly 97 percent of candidates passed.
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For years, many states have deliberately made the tests schoolchildren take easy in order to create a fraudulent appearance of progress. This was so before the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, and although that law sought to achieve quality schooling in exchange for federal dollars, the dumbing-down tradition has continued. A recent study conducted by Policy Analysis for California Education, a research institute run by Stanford University and the University of California, found that many states were continuing to make their students look better than they were in reality. The study, as cited in a
New York Times
editorial, showed that “students who performed brilliantly on state tests scored dismally on the federal National Assessment of Education Progress, the strongest, most well-respected test in the country.”
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The
New York Times
reported in July 25, 2006, that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings had rejected as inadequate the testing systems of Maine and Nebraska; federal money will be withheld from both. Other states may be in jeopardy.

Honesty testing:
“Integrity tests” have been marketed for several decades and their use by employers has recently grown substantially, and for two
good reasons. One is that employee theft has been rising, year by year; various recent estimates range from $30 billion to $60 billion.
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The other is that in 1988 Congress passed the Employment Polygraph Protection Act, which prohibited the use of lie-detection equipment in most employment settings; as a result, the use of paper-and-pencil and computerized integrity tests soared. Some integrity tests probe attitudes toward dishonest behavior by means of direct questions such as “Do you think it is stealing to take small items home from work?” or by inquiries about the applicant’s views on tardiness and absenteeism. Others use an indirect approach, measuring personality traits from which psychologists infer the applicant’s attitude toward honesty. Such tests ask questions like “How often do you blush?”, “How often are you embarrassed?”, and “Do you make your bed?”
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