Junior Meritocracy: Why kindergarten-admission tests are worthless

"In 2006, David Lohman, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, co-authored a paper called 'Gifted Today but Not Tomorrow?' in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, demonstrating just how labile 'giftedness' is. It notes that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or above on the Stanford-Binet would do so on another, similar IQ test at the same point in time. Combine this with the instability of 4-year-old IQs, and it becomes pretty clear that judgments about giftedness should be an ongoing affair, rather than a fateful determination made at one arbitrary moment in time. I wrote to Lohman and asked what percentage of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds. He answered with a careful regression analysis: about 25 percent."

Most people are surprised that IQ scores can change over time for the same individual. But this is a routine finding of most longitudinal studies of individual IQ. I've gathered other reports of this phenomenon in the psychological literature. For example, young people in the famous Lewis Terman longitudinal Genetic Studies of Genius (initial n=1,444 with n=643 in main study group) when tested at high school age (n=503) were found to have dropped 9 IQ points on average in Stanford-Binet IQ. More than two dozen children dropped by 15 IQ points and six by 25 points or more. Parents of those children reported no changes in their children or even that their children were getting brighter (Shurkin 1992, pp. 89-90). Terman observed a similar drop in IQ scores in his study group upon adult IQ testing (Shurkin 1992, pp. 147-150). Samuel R. Pinneau conducted a thorough review of the Berkeley Growth Study (1928-1946; initial n=61, n after eighteen years =40). Alice Moriarty was a Ph.D. researcher at the Menninger Foundation and describes in her book (1966) a number of case studies of longitudinal observations of children's IQ. She observed several subjects whose childhood IQ varied markedly over the course of childhood, and develops hypotheses about why those IQ changes occurred. Anastasi and Urbina (1997, p. 328) point out that childhood IQ scores are poorest at predicting subsequent IQ scores when taken at preschool age.

Anastasi, Anne & Urbina, Susana (1997). Psychological Testing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Moriarty, Alice E. (1966). Constancy and IQ Change: A Clinical View of Relationships between Tested IQ and Personality. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Pinneau, Samuel R. (1961). Changes in Intelligence Quotient Infancy to Maturity: New Insights from the Berkeley Growth Study with Implications for the Stanford-Binet Scales and Applications to Professional Practice. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.

In the beginning of the article, there seems to be an implicit claim that this kind of testing is bad because those who score on the border of a "cutoff" only have a probabilistic chance of making it into these coveted schools. The author seems to be suggesting that the error prone nature of measurement instruments means that we need to create something that is free of error or we need to stop using them all together. Unfortunately such instruments will never be error free and there doesn't seem to be an acceptable alternative for collecting predictive information. The measurement community will continue to improve on their instruments, but it seems like the only real remedy given the author's criticism is for these schools to just admit everyone so that nobody misses out. This, of course, isn't realistic.

When resources are thin and there is no way to deduce a provably optimal allocation, we start having to make guesses given the best possible information and algorithms. Until we can come up with something better, schools will continue needing instruments like these (as well as other tools) for making the best possible guesses.

I think that students should be given a selection of work ranging from easy to challenging and encouraged to choose the most demanding work they can. After a few iterations to allow the teacher to gently nudge kids toward their optimal difficulty, the students are evaluated based on their proficiency and chosen difficulty. This process should be repeated throughout their education to compensate for "late bloomers."

The terminology used to communicate to the students may have to be altered so as to prevent students from feeling obligated to choose a higher difficulty than they should, such as saying "choose the kind of work you find most enjoyable and least boring," so it sounds like a horizontal rather than vertical separation.

When my dad was growing up, getting into Harvard was considered a nice thing, but it wasn't expected that everyone halfway smart would vie for the Ivy League. Most people applied to two or three schools-- usually good colleges close by, such as the state flagships.

Now there's an obsession with elite schools, and it has trickled down even to the pre-school level, at ridiculous costs in both time and money. It's not about education; it's about social climbing.

I believe this is because society is beginning to unravel, even as technology and the economy improve. When society contracts, social connections become important because of the dwindling resources and hoarding.