Word: score
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Frenchman, the psychologist Alfred Binet, published the first standardized test of human intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker's "mental age," as revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that he called the "intelligence quotient," or IQ. It would be hard to think of a pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact on the way people think about themselves and others...
Terman believed IQ tests should be used to conduct a great sorting out of the population, so that young people would be assigned on the basis of their scores to particular levels in the school system, which would lead to corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adult life. The beginning of the IQ-testing movement overlapped with the eugenics movement--hugely popular in America and Europe among the "better sort" before Hitler gave it a bad name--which held that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing. The state sterilization that Justice Oliver Wendell...
...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...
...game, good for third in the nation, but that number is inflated by a conspicuously weak schedule. For example, five of Minnesota's wins came at the expense of lowly Mankato State--the only other non-ECAC team in Division I along with the Gophers--by a combined score of 39-3. In five games against the three other Final Four teams, Minnesota has scored only four goals in compiling a 0-2-3 record...