OpEd - Does Standardized Testing Correlate with Intelligence?

By Draven St.George

Standardized tests make up a large portion of the struggles that students must face when getting a degree, but do they really determine the intelligence of the student, or are they just a test of memory retention and the ability to quickly store temporary information? This article is here to show how there is, in fact, no direct correlation between standardized testing and how smart a student is as it goes into the basics of the difference between the idea of aptitude and intelligence. This article will show that aptitude is a basic ability to do something as “intelligence” is an acquisition of applying knowledge and skills simultaneously.

Students immediately doubt their capabilities after receiving a low score on a test or quiz, but does that really say anything about their intelligence? No, it doesn’t. Studies have shown that tests administered to students around the U.S. such as the SAT favor high-income students and that really, these tests are glorifying general intelligence as if it something that can be determined from the results of one of these tests. Although the SAT was first used as a standard IQ test, it has now become a selective competition between those who have the financial and social privilege to be able to master this test to use as a blue ribbon to show to college admissions. MENSA, a top intelligence organization for the top 99 percentile, has shown that their non-studiedly tests have shown successful results from people of all backgrounds, not just from those who have the resources to memorize the patterns and quirks of these standardized tests.

Picture from ThePavlovicToday.com

So where did the belief that there was a correlation start? The truth is: it’s what scholars of early colleges believed would be best for showing what kind of students they should accept into their universities. While it was unjust for them to put this initial impression on students based solely on their ability to recognize core subject questions within an allotted time, they did recognize this as faulty and upgraded it with the ACT. By any means, I am not saying that their initial comparison between test scores and intelligence was accurate, but at the time, and even now, it seemed like the best method for picking their bunch of students out of the thousands that apply. So really, is it more incorrect for the colleges to determine that this is how students’ smarts would be monitored, or is it the colleges’ overall misunderstanding of the word “intelligence?”

What does intelligence even mean? The basic definition is “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills,” which differs from aptitude’s definition of “a natural ability to do something.” So can intelligence mean memorizing strategies and techniques to do well on an aptitude test, or is that simply what puts the “aptitude” in an “aptitude test?” The major point to exclaim in this argument is that the line is drawn between intelligence and aptitude when it comes to the knowledge of “inherited patterns”, a person who has aptitude can learn the patterns of something in order to perfect it, but a person with intelligence was born with the instinct of pattern recognition.

An illustration from Pepperdine-Graphic.com

So if you are a person who seems to be considered “lackluster” in school because of mental drawbacks and an ability to not keep the condensed core information in your head, don’t take that as an attack on you not being “intelligent.” Having aptitude can be learned and obtained, but intelligence is already within you, so don’t let the poor scores on standardized tests and the rejections from colleges for a seemingly “under-average” intelligence let you believe that you are not intelligent because they are nowhere near being the same thing.