For as long as humans have existed perceived intelligence has played a role in social standings. But how do we correctly determine intelligence? Should we base someone's perceived intelligence on academic or occupational success? What is the most effective way of accurately testing the intelligence of a person? Is there a downside to intelligence testing? Alfred Binet and David Wechsler, as well as many others attempted to answer these questions.
Alfred Binet is thought to be the pioneer of modern intelligence testing. He was commissioned by the Paris school system in 1904 to evaluate children and decide which children would benefit most form special education. In order to test the students Binet developed his first scale which measured memory, attention, comprehension, discrimination, and reasoning. From Binet's philosophies William Stern developed the idea of the IQ, or intelligence quotient, in 1914 to be a global indication. A child's IQ was determined by dividing a child's mental age by the child's chronological age. This number was then multiplied by 100 to eliminate fractional values. This test is only meant to indicate scholastic aptitude. This test has a major weakness in that many people misuse it to try and measure future life, marital or occupational success. Many educations also misused IQ scores as a way to write off a student who did poorly or did not show interest in schooling. The main flaw in this type of testing is that it can only measure classroom success.
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According to David Wechsler's Global Capacity View, intelligence is not based on the sum of tested abilities alone. Wechsler defines intelligence as "the global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, think rationally, and deal effectively with the environment." Wechsler's theory is a better indicator of intelligence because it measures intelligence in many settings not just the classroom. The weakness in this type of testing is that only small samples of abilites are tested.
