IQ test cultural bias?

Question

People always say that IQ tests are bias and as evidence they give a variation on this question:

"A is to B as C is to D"

This is an analogy question that once appeared in an SAT (a test widely used in the United States for college admissions), to which the correct answer was: RUNNER is to MARATHON as OARSMAN is to REGATTA.

That particular question appeared on an SAT test in the 1970s and not on an IQ test as widely asserted. Now is there any other reason why people think IQ tests are bias against a particular group?

Answer 1

There are many things that can make an IQ test culturally biased. For example, most IQ tests are strongly English oriented. There are a lot of Latinos that come to America and they are not native speakers. This strongly disables them from getting high scores on an IQ test that is strongly English based. I think California has actually banned many IQ tests (they have many Latinos) because they are strongly English based. New laws have also been put in place making it wrong to place somebody in Special Ed based upon IQ tests alone because of things like this.



Other cultural biased IQ tests are questions that refer to american culture. For example:



1. Napoleon is to beer as _____ is to salad dressing.



a. Washington



b. Arthur



c. Cesar



If their culture does not have Cesar Salad Dressing than most likely they are not going to understand this question and probably get it wrong.



There are actually people out there that are trying to make the IQ tests more culturally fair. It hasn't been achieved yet but they are still working on it.



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And as the person above me said, IQ tests often are based upon your own education. People's IQ's actually raise after they further their education.... many of the skills needed to get a good grade in the IQ test are skills you learn in school. That is why many minority groups often get lower scores. They are less likely to have equal opportunities to whites which also means less education opportunities. IQ tests can reflect personal intelligence, but they also can reflect your education....

Answer 2

It is nearly impossible to write an IQ which doesn’t incorporate some sort of cultural bias for the sheer fact that language in and of itself is cultural, and language is used in the writing of such tests, save attempts by some in the past to invent picture based tests.



When looking at minority groups which score lower on |IQ tests on average it begs the question, are these tests bias in some way? Of course one could argue that it may be due at least in part to a poorer education system. However, one could also argue that this is discredited by the fact that culturally specific IQ tests given to minority groups result in higher scoring.



On a side not, from personal experience I’ve observed that IQ tests more accurately test the level of education a person has had in their lives (and how fresh that education is) rather than their personal intelligence.

Answer 3

"It is extremely difficult to develop a test that measures innate intelligence without introducing cultural bias. This has been virtually impossible to achieve. One attempt was to eliminate language and design tests with demonstrations and pictures. Another approach is to realize that culture-free tests are not possible and to design culture-fair tests instead. These tests draw on experiences found in many cultures.



Many college students have a middle-class background and may have difficulty appreciating the biases that are part of standardized intelligence tests, because their own background does not disadvantage them for these tests. By doing some intelligence tests which make non-mainstream cultural assumptions, students can come to experience some of the difficulties and issues involved with culturally biased methods of testing intelligence."

http://wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBias.html#CulturalBias



Some years back there was the Dove Counterbalance General Intelligence Test. It was done in English and normed to an American culture. It was "a half-serious attempt to show that American children are just not all speaking the same language. Those students who are not "culturally deprived" will score well." However the culture was not college students with a middle-class background.



No IQ test is free of culture bias. Further, many factors impact someone's test score (bad day,motivation, relationship to the administrator, how the test is score, etc.) It's not accurate to decide someone's IQ based on one test.

Answer 4

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RE:

IQ test cultural bias?

People always say that IQ tests are bias and as evidence they give a variation on this question:



"A is to B as C is to D"



This is an analogy question that once appeared in an SAT (a test widely used in the United States for college admissions), to which the correct answer was:...

Answer 5

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If you are arguing that tests do not have cultural bias, you have a hard position to demonstrate. Cultural variations involve different world views and different language and even different meanings for similar words in the same language. So pretty well any word question will be open to multiple interpretation, as there are two persons involved in the communication, the person asking, and the person receiving the question. What I intend with what I ask may not be interpreted in that exact way by a person who has a different cultural mind set and lexicon. In fact, this happens frequently, with the disparity and confusion increasing as the commonality of the cultural bias is decreased. Even those pictograph questions impose a potential and frequently real ambiguity. Just to take a very simple example, recently on Yahoo was a news article discussing evidence for a different early man migration path than previously thought. The article used the words "may" and "appear to be", which were very clear in intent for me, someone quite habituated to this sort of use of words to describe something generally quite likely, but the comments from several readers focussed on that wording as indicating that there was nothing learned, since "may" and "appear to be" have a completely different and much more intense aspect of uncertainty in their non-scientific culture than was intended by the people employing those terms..

Answer 6

Culturally Biased