Intelligence Testing Quotes

The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more. The Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.

Stupid people shouldn’t breed.

Now intelligence seemed quantifiable. You could measure someone's actual or potential height, and now, it seemed, you could also measure someone's actual or potential intelligence. We had one dimension of mental ability along which we could array everyone... The whole concept has to be challenged; in fact, it has to be replaced.

Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

I don't know what my IQ is. People who gloat about their IQ's are losers

IQ is the biggest scam in the history of education. Nobody needs IQ testing. Nobody benefits when you do it. I'm in a very different position than most of you; I don't want an IQ test for Black kids, and one for green kids, and one for yellow kids, and one for red kids. I don't want any for anybody, because it offers no benefits to anyone….The disproportionate placement of African-American males in classes for the mentally retarded should have taught a prudent person that something is wrong with intelligence testing.

I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences.

I was quite disruptive and out there. Then I found myself in a load of remedial classes being told how to use a ruler. But when they tested my IQ, they found out I was quite intelligent.

Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.

To talk about the superiority of an ethnic group on the basis of some points of difference on IQ tests is idiotic.

I make fun of Mensa. I don't know a great deal about Mensa - that's the high IQ group - but I say, 'To get into Mensa, you have to have a high IQ, and once you get in, you spend your time congratulating people who are in Mensa with you.' To me that's a pretty stupid way to spend your life.

You can't measure a dog's intelligence by giving him a verbal test 'cause it's not on their scale, but that doesn't mean they're not intelligent creatures.

I don't think anyone thinks that the SAT score is a measure of your innate intelligence. It is not. That is a fallacious concept, and we at Kaplan, and others who are in a position, should be out there making sure people know this is nothing, this score does not have anything to do with your innate intelligence.

Current intelligence-testing practices require examinees to answer but not to pose questions. In requiring only the answering of questions, these tests are missing a vital half of intelligence- the asking of questions.

We're so used to the tests telling me if I'm smart or not. It's telling me if I know the material or not.

IQ tests are routinely used as weapons against Black people in particular and minority groups and poor people generally. The tests are based on white middle-class standards, and when we score low on them, the results are used to justify the prejudice that we are inferior and unintelligent. Since we are taught to believe that the tests are infallible, they have become a self-fulfilling prophecy that cuts off our initiative and brainwashes us.

Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining.

Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying . . . demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism.

To apply for a gifted program, children as young as 4 are required to sit through hour-long verbal exams.

And so, you can do hundreds and hundreds of studies showing a general factor and just so long as you restrict your populations, your testing materials and the kinds of situations you look at, you can keep finding the same wrong thing again and again.

Blacks in the Caribbean, Britain, Canada and sub-Saharan Africa as well as in the United States have low IQ scores relative to whites.

When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong; they taught me different was wrong.