A recurring theme in the criticisms against intelligence tests is that they do not test for general intelligence free from any requirement of prior knowledge (as defined by their creators) because they take cultural biases for granted as common sense. This is highlighted clearly by the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (BITCH) developed by Dr. Robert Williams. This test has similar questions as that of standardized IQ tests but subjective to the Black American experience, displaying the subjectivity inherent in the line of questioning considered to be objective by many. 

I thought it would be interesting to analyze the Culture Fair Test that was created in light of these criticisms which uses visual patterns to prevent cultural references or subjectivity from tainting the results of the IQ test. 

ex_20iq_20test.png

It's not clear to me what is being assessed in these kind of tests - it may be helpful to identify if somebody's pattern recognition skills are significantly slower or underdeveloped as compared to the rest of the people that took the test. But it seems to put a lot more weight on visual reasoning rather than general intelligence and conflates the two. Beyond that, I would say that this is an issue with the 'culture unfair' IQ tests as well - it is difficult to propose a way to measure general intelligence when we don't even have a definition of what that is.

There are a lot of cases in which a single number to compare people with makes things easier administratively, but this does not mean that these numbers are telling of innate capability. As Stephen Jay Gould said in the video on Yerkes, we have a tendency to simplify the complex - and something as complex as the brain cannot be encapsulated in an IQ test. It seems that modern standardized tests like the GRE or career aptitude tests are more aware of this and tend to acknowledge their purposes as being more specific or aim to accomodate for a greater variety of types of intelligence. I wonder in what ways they might be encouraging a similar simplification or introducing new challenges.

Links

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-387-71799-9_46

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/tests/iq/culture-fair-iq-test

https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/supporting-material/yerkes-army-intelligence-tests