INTELLIGENCE TESTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 274, 19 November 1927, Page 8

INTELLIGENCE TESTS.

The report of -Br. T. G. Gray, InspectorGeneral of Mental Hospitals, contains much valuable material, but we have space just now fcr reference to only one of its many interesting features. In dealing with the definition and classification of mental defectives, Dr. Gray refers to "intelligence tests," and he condemns them in no uncertain terms. With all the authority due to his wide experience and his high professional standing, Dr. Gray "deprecates the growing tendency to depend upon so-called intelligence tests," and the reasons he gives are. identical with those that we have often advanced in condemning them. In spite of all the parade of psychological accuracy and scientific prestige with which Terman and Ballard and their followers invest these tests,' they are, as Dr. Gray has well said, "rather tests of the opportunities that the child has already enjoyed for acquiring knowledge than tests of innate intelligence." And so the whole case, for the supremacy of "intelligence tests" for psychological and educational purposes breaks down completely. We observe with regret that the Education Department of New South Wales has been applying "intelligence tests" to a number of its public school children, and the results were set forth in detail in a cable message from Sydney yesterday. But the fact that the system has been adopted by certain authorities does not in any way weaken the critieism to which it has been subjected by many eminent educationists and psychologists, and which has been forcibly expressed for the benefit of New Zealand teachers and our Education Department by Dr. Gray.