A lot of my friends in academia recognize that I'm not a typical academic in a lot of ways. One of the biggest ways I am atypical is that I don't really like the way the academic game is played. This will be the first of probably several posts "exposing" (or complaining about) aspects of academia.
The first round of complaints deals with publishing, or how you get rewarded in academia. In the real world, you can get published if there are enough people interested in what you have to say. In the academic world, that is largely irrelevant. To get published in academia, you have to say something that no one has said before.
This may not be a bad idea in the hard sciences, where it is all about discovery. Even in the social sciences, if you get new data you can often say something new. It causes some difficulties in other disciplines, though. If I am researching political theory, I am expected to come up with something that hasn't been said in the last 2500 years of political theory. This leaves me with two broad options: either I can say something so specific that no one really cares (but, hey, it's at least "new") or I can something utterly ridiculous (but new). That is how you get published in academia.
Even this wouldn't be so bad, except that in order to advance in academia, you have to publish. If you don't have a certain amount of publications in your first 7 years as a professor, you lose your job. So, in order to keep my job, I have to come up with either ridiculous things or things that no one cares about.
Granted, occasionally there are authentically good new ideas that come out of this process. Those individuals deserve to be the academic rock stars. I may be able to come up with one of those things myself, but it is doubtful. Instead, I must publish something no one cares about, or come out with something that is ridiculous that I don't actually believe (but try unsuccessfully to defend). That is my chosen career.
What's sad is that this ridiculous process is widely recognized as being ridiculous among academics. We joke about it in private conversations at conferences. And yet the ridiculousness is so enshrined that we can only mock it behind its back. Reform is just a dream.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
How useful are IQ tests as a measure of intelligence?
While observing some of our incoming freshmen take "placement exams" yesterday, I was reminded of an academic study in which I participated back in the late 1990s. They wanted to compare IQ scores of perceived intelligent people given different test formats and different testing atmospheres. So I took I think 10 different tests over two weeks in different settings.
I ended up with an unusually high range of scores. They ranged from 111 to 155. Most of the tests concluded I was in the high 120s to mid 130s.
First a note on what these scores supposedly mean. According to most scoring models, the scores designed to measure what percentile of the overall population you are more intelligent than. A score of 100 is average. A 111 puts me at smarter than about 75% of the population. A 155 places me smarter than 99.9% of the population. There is quite a difference between those two numbers. According to one I am smart enough to survive college and according to the other I am a genius.
So, how did I end up with such a wide range of scores? There were three variations in the tests that impacted me in particular: time, distraction, and spacial reasoning. I did much better in untimed tests than timed ones. I did much better when there was little distraction than when there was a lot. Finally, I have a really low spacial reasoning iq.
My 111 score involved a timed test, with a large spatial reasoning component, and there were children playing loudly outside the window. My 155 score was an untimed test with no spatial reasoning component and a soft piano concerto playing in the background. Arguably, neither of those scenarios are good measures of my working intelligence. While I would like to do all of my thinking without time pressures and having classical piano in the background, that isn't real life.
The reason I talk about this is that admission to gifted programs in school are frequently tied to iq tests. I didn't get into the gifted program in elementary school, in spite of being widely recognized as the smartest kid in my class. My sister was admitted, and she will be the first to tell you that I have a much higher iq than her (although she more than crushes me with eq).
The accuracy and legitimacy of iq tests worry me, especially for aspies. It is my impression (which may be wrong) that aspies have "specialized intelligence". We tend to be exceptional at some things and bad at others, even if they are somewhat related. Immanuel Kant, for example, was probably an aspie (he's been dead for a while, but based on everything I've read about him, he fits every criteria). He was arguably one of the greatest philosophers in world history. Yet, in spite of his clear genius, there were certain fields of study he just could not do. I wonder what his iq score would have been when he was 9 years old. Would Kant have been "tracked" with the average or below average kids? (I was until about 4th grade.) How much genius are we missing because we don't really know how to measure this type of specialized intelligence?
I'm not sure if there is a point to all this rambling. It's just something I've been thinking about the last couple days. If you can figure out the point to my rambling, please comment so as to help other readers and myself.
I ended up with an unusually high range of scores. They ranged from 111 to 155. Most of the tests concluded I was in the high 120s to mid 130s.
First a note on what these scores supposedly mean. According to most scoring models, the scores designed to measure what percentile of the overall population you are more intelligent than. A score of 100 is average. A 111 puts me at smarter than about 75% of the population. A 155 places me smarter than 99.9% of the population. There is quite a difference between those two numbers. According to one I am smart enough to survive college and according to the other I am a genius.
So, how did I end up with such a wide range of scores? There were three variations in the tests that impacted me in particular: time, distraction, and spacial reasoning. I did much better in untimed tests than timed ones. I did much better when there was little distraction than when there was a lot. Finally, I have a really low spacial reasoning iq.
My 111 score involved a timed test, with a large spatial reasoning component, and there were children playing loudly outside the window. My 155 score was an untimed test with no spatial reasoning component and a soft piano concerto playing in the background. Arguably, neither of those scenarios are good measures of my working intelligence. While I would like to do all of my thinking without time pressures and having classical piano in the background, that isn't real life.
The reason I talk about this is that admission to gifted programs in school are frequently tied to iq tests. I didn't get into the gifted program in elementary school, in spite of being widely recognized as the smartest kid in my class. My sister was admitted, and she will be the first to tell you that I have a much higher iq than her (although she more than crushes me with eq).
The accuracy and legitimacy of iq tests worry me, especially for aspies. It is my impression (which may be wrong) that aspies have "specialized intelligence". We tend to be exceptional at some things and bad at others, even if they are somewhat related. Immanuel Kant, for example, was probably an aspie (he's been dead for a while, but based on everything I've read about him, he fits every criteria). He was arguably one of the greatest philosophers in world history. Yet, in spite of his clear genius, there were certain fields of study he just could not do. I wonder what his iq score would have been when he was 9 years old. Would Kant have been "tracked" with the average or below average kids? (I was until about 4th grade.) How much genius are we missing because we don't really know how to measure this type of specialized intelligence?
I'm not sure if there is a point to all this rambling. It's just something I've been thinking about the last couple days. If you can figure out the point to my rambling, please comment so as to help other readers and myself.
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