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Show The child's educational career is shaped by the I.Q. tests. The top five or ten per cent are set on the academic high road to Intelligence Tests May Be Doing 'Incalculable Harm9 Educators and psychologists are re-examining the subject of standardized I. Q. tests for chil- j dren, arguing that using them in guidance can do "incalcuable h.arm." In an article, "Let's Look at Those I. Q. Tests," in the December De-cember Reader's Digest, John Kord Lagemann says that the tests are supposed to measure only "native ability" but actually are linked to culture. In prosperous pros-perous suburbia, one out of four children scores above 125; in poor neighborhoods, only one out of 16. college; the bottom group are labeled "slow" and taught accordingly. ac-cordingly. A teacher may try tQ ignore the tests, but as one said, "Once you know a child's I.Q., you tend to see him through it." At some popular colleges, I.Q. 120 has become the cut off point for applicants. At the University of Kansas, a, survey was taken of the classes from 1955 to 1959. If the under-120 group had been barred, it wa,s; found, the nation would have lost 202 teachers,. 176 engineers, 22 journalists, 31 lawyers and 25 doctors several of whom graduated with top-honors. top-honors. By law this university accepts any graduate of a state accredited high school. Britain is the only country outside the United States which uses standardized tests extensively. exten-sively. The USSR does not. Mr. Lagemann concludes. "Abandonment "Abandon-ment of standardized testing will upset our entire sorting our process, pro-cess, but which is worse, to use individual human judgments, with their known fallibility, or an impersonal system that operates ope-rates logically from a false premise?" |