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zoobyshoe
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zoobyshoe said:So, the obvious question is, "When and how did physics majors take control of designing I.Q. tests?"
My question was a little joke: if physics majors have the highest I.Q., it could only be because they got control of designing the tests and designed them so that their skill set would give the highest results. Hahaha.Sophia said:Well it's because of the time and space when it was invented. As someone else already said, people with mathematical intelligence are considered smart, because for an average person, math is difficult.
Also, in the past gaining education guaranteed that you get a nice job and become wealthy. So what they did was create a general test based on skills that were required at school at that time and said that if you can do that, you can do well at school and have a good life.
If you can't do the test, you are stupid and sentenced to manual labour for the rest of your life.
Of course, I am exaggerating. No one was so explicit. But on average, this thought has been in collective unconscious mind for a long time.
But actually, I.Q. Tests were invented, not to identify smart people but to identify people who would need extra help in the new required school system in France:
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologicaltesting/a/int-history.htm[/QUOTE]Interest in intelligence dates back thousands of years, but it wasn't until psychologist Alfred Binet was commissioned to identify students who needed educational assistance that the first IQ test was born.
Alfred Binet and the First IQ Test
During the early 1900s, the French government asked psychologist Alfred Binet to help decide which students were mostly likely to experience difficulty in schools.
The government had passed laws requiring that all French children attend school, so it was important to find a way to identify children who would need specialized assistance...
Binet was mostly interested in identifying retarded people and calculating an intellectual age for them so they could be taught at a level they could handle. The alternative would have been to take them out of school and put them in asylums, as some people wanted to do, where they'd get no education at all.