Word: iq
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...American IQ promoters scored a great coup during World War I when they persuaded the Army to give IQ tests to 1.7 million inductees. It was the world's first mass administration of an intelligence test, and many of the standardized tests in use today can be traced back to it: the now ubiquitous and obsessed-over SAT; the Wechsler, taken by several million people a year, according to its publisher; and Terman's own National Intelligence Test, originally used in tracking elementary school children. All these tests took from the Army the basic technique of measuring intelligence mainly...
...British sociologist named Michael Young coined the word "meritocracy" to denote a society that organizes itself according to IQ-test scores. That term too has entered the language, though it doesn't have quite the market penetration that IQ does--or the disparaging overtone that Young intended in his satiric fable The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033. Terman and many other early advocates of IQ testing had in mind the creation of an American meritocracy, though the word didn't exist then. They believed IQ tests could be the means to create, for the first time ever, a society...
...order to believe this, though, you have to believe that merit and a score on an IQ test are the same thing. Long before IQ was invented, America prided itself on being a country without a class system, in which the talented and industrious would rise and be rewarded. The advent of intelligence tests did not dramatically affect the degree of social mobility in the U.S.--at least not enough for any change to show up in the social-science data. If IQ tests measure a trait that is genetic, and therefore inherited, or a trait that is culturally transmitted...
What they have done, though, is create a kind of mini-meritocracy for a few people who are very high in one ability. If you score in the top 1% on IQ tests, a system is in place in this country that is amazingly good at finding you and offering you access to a first-class education that can often lead to first-class job opportunities. People with very high IQs don't necessarily run the country; they do, however, usually have access to a privileged and protected position...
...IQ tests to limit the opportunities of most other people that led to the anti-IQ rebellion that broke out in the last third of the century. It was probably most intense in Britain, whose public schools at midcentury had adopted a particularly severe system of sorting by test at age 11. By 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court had banned the use of IQ tests in employment except in very rare cases...