Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Murray wants to abolish the SAT

Charles Murray has probably done more than anyone to convince the public about the importance of IQ tests, as he argued in The Bell Curve that they were correlated with success in many ways.

Now he argues for abolishing them:
Hence the final reason for getting rid of the SAT: knowing those scores is too dispiriting for those who do poorly and too inspiriting for those who do well. In an age when intellectual talent is increasingly concentrated among young people who are also privileged economically and socially, the last thing we need are numbers that give these very, very lucky kids a sense of entitlement.
That SAT test has already become less of an IQ test.

Note that this is not the argument that some make that IQ tests are meaningless. His argument is based on IQ tests being too important.

There are similar sorts of arguments against genetic testing. Some say the tests are useless, while others are frightened of the possibility that the tests will tell them more than they want to know about themselves.

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