BOSTON—At last weekend’s annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston, Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity. Sternberg offered his views in a lecture associated with receiving a William James Fellow Award from the APS for his lifetime contributions to psychology. He explained his concerns to Scientific American.
Scientific American: Is the U.S. Education System Producing a Society of “Smart Fools”?
So far the pitch is relatively benign and nondescript so let's get to some fightin' words.
In your talk, you said that IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”—people who have a certain kind of intelligence but not the kind that can help our society make progress against our biggest challenges. What are these tests getting wrong?
Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent—but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.
- SA
Scientific American: Is the U.S. Education System Producing a Society of “Smart Fools”?
So far the pitch is relatively benign and nondescript so let's get to some fightin' words.
In your talk, you said that IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”—people who have a certain kind of intelligence but not the kind that can help our society make progress against our biggest challenges. What are these tests getting wrong?
Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent—but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.
- SA
You probably know already the Rockhouse is powering up the defensive, extremely-powerful lasers but they will be held in abeyance for the moment to review the remainder before deciding to fire.
What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people, we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.
- SA
Seems like he's drifting into ethics more than education but, ok, since perhaps ethics is the recommendation.
Are you hopeful about change?
If one could convince even a few universities and schools to try to follow a different direction, others might follow. If you start encouraging a creative attitude, to defy the crowd and to defy the zeitgeist, and if you teach people to think for themselves and how what they do affects others, I think it’s a no-lose proposition. And these things can be taught and they can be tested.
- SA
From that we observe nothing is going to happen. There is much more to the article so the interested student is invited ...
The Rockhouse observed nothing in the article which differentiated which kids should be in the university in the first place. The topic of better help for kids in selecting appropriate schools has been flogged here since some kids would enjoy and would be served better by vocational schools and others will not but there's little apparent recognition of that at the high school level as is evident by the ubiquitous insistence on a university degree.
I'm a smart fool and I've happy to be one since I don't feel let down by my time in university in any way. It can be a path to wisdom but that isn't going to work for everyone since a practical wisdom is an almost entirely different thing because that probably will not allow for pure science which may not even work and may not produce anything at all.
Note: I didn't much care for computer tests from multiple choice queries but give me an essay test and I'll own it ... and I did, many times.
Ed: so you're still blowin' bullshit after all these years
Yep, I definitely am and it will appear as bullshit to those approaching with practical wisdom but it may not to others. As the good professor said, that's not so much an indicator of the presence / lack of intelligence but rather the ethical education which came with it.
Some say religion provides that ethical education and perhaps it's true but there''s nothing gained by extending that here.
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