Word: dipsticks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tests rate classroom learning, aptitude tests assay something in between--developed abilities. Developed abilities are those nurtured through schoolwork, reading, doing crosswords, soaking up the arts, debating politics, whatever. These aren't inborn traits but honed competencies. Whereas early psychometricians, many of them racist, propagated what Lemann calls the dipstick theory--the idea that a test score is like a mark on a dipstick showing the raw amount of intelligence in your mental oil tank--the field outgrew that simplistic notion at least a generation ago. "I don't think anyone believes the SAT or even pure [IQ] tests...
...nine billion names of God did it get to this: Dead in the middle of a lecture on Plato or sociological concepts or Joyce, some god-awful ear-piercingly high shriek of Beethoven’s Ninth repeats over and over again until the dipstick, realizing the phone is his or hers, fumbles among candy wrappers and Chapstick to turn it off, only for it—or another—to go off five minutes later. And I love the people who are too humiliated to take responsibility, instead simply allowing the phone to complete a cycle of four...
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