Morality of Intelligence Testing

Morality of Intelligence Testing Name Institutional Affiliation Morality of Intelligence Testing Intelligent tests or intelligence quotient tests have been around for a while. Even though there are different moral concerns regarding their administration, intelligence tests have been administered and continue playing a significant role in the recruitment of learners in schools and colleges. Military departments are also still using IQ tests to categorize soldiers into their specific categories for increased productivity. Nevertheless, an IQ test is just one of many psychological tests with moral questions, but is still finding significant social and economic applications in contemporary society. This paper discusses the impact of IQ testing in the educational setting and uses the adverse impact model of fairness testing to determine the fairness of this psychological testing approach. Intelligent tests have attracted significant criticisms for advocating for inequality and unfairness in society. According to Benson (2013), the people of color have performed poorly on IQ tests compared to their white counterparts. Additionally, people with low economic status in society have scored less compared to those from affluent families, creating a notion that intelligence runs in the family line. The findings from IQ tests have raised moral concerns regarding knowledge and intelligence in society. Primarily, the major concerns have been observed from a social, cultural, and legal perspective. When IQ tests are administered in schools to determine children with mental retardation, children with low scores are made to believe that they cannot do better compared to their counterparts with higher scores. This creates a notion of mental retardation, weakening the morale of children that fail to pass the IQ tests. Even though the advantage of these tests in schools is that they help teachers identify the vulnerable group and focus on it, IQ tests still cause controversies as they have a westernized nature. The findings are biased against the people of color. When IQ tests are applied at the cultural level, they tend to create an exclusion mechanism. Proponents of IQ tests fail to recognize that knowledge is shared and learned. The transfer of knowledge takes place in a social environment. According to Benson (2013), scholars have found beyond reasonable doubt that children who scored low on IQ tests have ended up leading successful lives compared to their counterparts that had higher IQ scored. While it is true that learners with low IQs are likely to stay motivated through life as the...