Testing Life Quotients

Most IQ tests lack the flexibility to gauge personal ability three Harvard professors told a crowd of more than 200 yesterday at the symposium entitled "Beyond the IQ."

Professor of Psychiatry Robert Coles '50, Senior Research Associate in Education Howard E. Gardner '65 and Associate Professor of Education Carol Gilligan all agreed that IQ tests are too one-dimensional to test contemporary society.

"The use of IQ tests causes us to focus primarily on two types of learning, linguistic and mathematical skills," Gardner warned, the narrow focus results in an "individually centered curriculum," tailor-made for IQ tests.

Our bias is toward what he called "westist: the placing of certain values on a pedestal" and "testist: if it can't be tested, then forget it," Gardner said.

Pulitzer prize winner Coles agreed with Gardner on the narrowness of IQ tests. "There is more intelligence than just numbers and letters. There is parental, moral and ethical intelligence as well," he said. A lot of ordinary people survive without a lot of intelligence, he said. "It just depends on how we use the intelligence."

In comparison, there's the story of the person who got all A's but flunked life, Coles said.

Gilligan spoke on the systematic exclusion of women, intellectually and personally, from educational practices. Beginning with adolescence, women are exposed to the male world, she said. To combat this, she suggested that society should give special attention to adolescent girls, a critical time because "self-assurance usually wanes at this time," she said.