Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Height is well-defined, easily measurable, observable, and highly correlated to the ability to put a ball in a basket that is high off the ground. It is not at all comparable to IQ, which is neither well-understood nor well-defined.

Measure height in 10 different ways on 10 different days, and you'll get the same value. Measure IQ 10 different ways on 10 different days and you'll get 10 different values. Do I have the same IQ at 3am after I haven't eaten all day, as I do at noon on a full stomach and a good night's sleep? I guarantee you my score will be different in both scenarios, so does that mean I have two IQs? Sleepy IQ vs. Alert IQ? When measuring IQ, is sleepiness vs. alertness controlled for? Is hunger?

Somehow I took a test in 3rd grade that changed the trajectory of my life. What if I didn't eat that morning? No one checked, and the only one to feed me was my mother. What if she didn't feed me? Would my IQ have dropped 10 points on that test and caused my entire life to change? Very possibly, I was on the threshold. I'm quite sure that some people in the room taking the test with me didn't eat that day, maybe not since lunch time the day before, since the test was at 8am. Would it surprise you to know that of the people in my class who were hungry while taking that test that day, most of them were children of color?

How do you think the IQ results turn out when a majority of children of color are hungry while taking it, and the majority of white kids are well-fed. At my school it meant that a majority of "gifted" students were white. Actually, come to think of it, all of them were. Not a single minority, despite minorities being represented at a proportionate rate at my school.

What's scary to me is that the unstated opinion in some of my social circles is that this situation is the result of whites simply having a higher IQ. As your post seems to imply here.

Edit: To the dead comment below me:

> IQ is very well defined - it's the grade you get in an IQ test

That's called a tautology, so what you're saying is that the tests are not measuring anything except themselves. The rest I will leave dead because it's subjective, so no need to resurrect it, but the way you defined IQ here is a verifiable logical flaw in your argument.

(I'm not here to defend whatever you think your arguing against, more interested in your thought processes here.)

It's weird that on one hand you suggest IQ may be a poor, simplistic measure of whether a student is 'gifted', but then on the other hand reduce basketball skill/ability to a simplistic measure such as height.

It also seems you are making a number of claims or hypotheses here that I'm personally interested in knowing if there is any data/evidence to support:

1. Taking a test on multiple days produces high enough variance in results, that the test results are not predictive of any sort of ability or future outcomes

2. The majority of 'children of color' are hungry when taking IQ tests ('of color' in popular usage means non-white)

3. The majority of white children are well-fed when taking IQ tests

Reading between the lines, it seems you are hinting at the idea that all humans who approach the IQ test are equal in ability that the IQ test is testing for. If there are any disparities in results amongst any groups, it must be the result of other factors like being hungry/tired/etc. Is that a fair characterization?

For example, would you say hunger/tiredness is the core reason white children don't all have the same exact scores?

> 1. Taking a test on multiple days produces high enough variance in results, that the test results are not predictive of any sort of ability or future outcomes

What I'm saying here is that hunger and sleep are two confounding factors always present in any testing situation, at least in my experience as an educator. I have seen it personally in my students, especially when comparing my 8am section performance with my 12pm section's performance for the same class on the same tests and material. The 8am section consistently performs worse (sometimes by half a letter grade or more) on their tests compared to their 12pm peers, and this has been true across my career. What's interesting is I can compare these students across semesters, since they take multiple classes with me. I can see how they perform at 8am one semester vs 12pm another. But this is just my own little experience with college-age students, I'm not familiar with recent literature.

Anyway, the point is if I'm seeing these things in my students there is no reason to thing we wouldn't see these performance drops on 3rd graders doing an IQ test as well. So the question is: why aren't they controlling for these things? Or are they, and I don't know. Because they didn't control them for my cohort when I was tested.

> 2. The majority of 'children of color' are hungry when taking IQ tests ('of color' in popular usage means non-white) 3. The majority of white children are well-fed when taking IQ tests

I wasn't making a generalization here, I was specifically talking about my school.

> Reading between the lines, it seems you are hinting at the idea that all humans who approach the IQ test are equal in ability that the IQ test is testing for. If there are any disparities in results amongst any groups, it must be the result of other factors like being hungry/tired/etc. Is that a fair characterization?

Don't read between the lines here too much, I was making a concrete argument: If we want to measure something like IQ, we should do so rigorously and with purpose, because otherwise what are we even doing?

Even if we just assume IQ is defined as the result of the IQ test, we know that test result can vary based on testing conditions and the emotional state of the tester during the test. With regular testing this is not so bad because the effects average out over time, unless the problem is chronic. With IQ test though, the presence of these confounding factors is especially vexatious, because there is a general perception that IQ is a fixed, immutable quantity, so the score you get on the test cannot be improved.

In the context of gifted programs it means these tests are usually administered once and early during the normal course of a child's 12 year education, and these program really only exist in elementary school; by the time children get to middle and high school there are other mechanisms for sorting children (standard, honors, ap, electives, votech etc.). With something so consequential, we need to do it right, rather than just do a thing because it sounds right and hope that it works out for the best for everyone. If the consequences weren't so monumental than the slapdash approach I experienced (and again, this was a long time ago but at the same time not so long ago. Maybe it's different now, but this is how it was for me maybe things have changed drastically).

Despite the drawbacks you listed here of the IQ test (which are drawbacks of testing in general I think), which are all true, there is no better predictor we know of than SAT like tests or IQ (which are pretty similar and what they test for). What do you suggest doing then?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com