Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!oliveb!sun!livesey
From: livesey@sun.uucp (Jon Livesey)
Newsgroups: sci.misc
Subject: Re: Bias on IQ tests
Message-ID: <48986@sun.uucp>
Date: 10 Apr 88 23:12:54 GMT
References: <3943@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <73600018@uiucdcsp> <253@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Mtn View, CA
Lines: 191


	I apologise in advance for wasting everyone's time with this.
I think that this article is in a completely inappropriate newsgroup.
However, since it is here, I'll have to answer it here.

In article <253@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>, mmh@ivax.doc.ic.ac.uk (Matthew Huntbach) writes:
> 
> I don't usually read this newsgroup, so I may have missed some of the 
> discussion, but I really am surprised that no-one has brought up the
> subject of motivation at least in what I've read. 
> 
> If someone sits you down with a paper full of daft questions that you could
> answer but you really couldn't be bothered with, you may just spend your
> time thinking about what you're going to do tonight, wondering what's for dinner
> or so on. If that paper happens to be an IQ test you're going to score low.
> 
> If however you know exactly what IQ tests are, how the world takes them
> absurdly seriously, and you've also had plenty of experience of doing things
> under exam conditions, of course you're going to score a lot better.
> 
> As an example, when I was a kid at primary school in England, one day I
> came in and the class was all sat down in a different room than usual
> at separate desks, told to keep quiet and given some work to get on with.
> Since I liked schoolwork, I went ahead and did it.

	I kind of wonder about this.   I took the eleven-plus exam in London
in 1956, and we knew ahead of time what day the exam was on, what the
significance of the exam was, and what the approximate content of the exam
was, since we had a rehearsal exam a couple of months ahead of time.   Not
only that, but you could buy books of tests which were similar to eleven-plus
questions, and try them out as much as you liked.   It sounds as though 
Mathew's memory may be letting him down, or he simply went to a school where 
the teachers were not quite on the ball.   I suspect it's his memory, since I
can recall our teacher telling us that the reason we were having a rehearsal
exam was that tests like this are simply not valid if some people have tried
them ahead of time, and some people have not.   Therefore the rehearsal was
required, and please take it seriously, and so on and so forth.   We did,
since even at age eleven, we knew what was serious, just by watching how seriously
our teacher was taking it.

	(By the way, Mathew also seems to be confusing two tests, one an IQ test
that we took about a month ahead of the eleven-plus, and the eleven-plus itself
which is a fairly standard english-and-math exam.   In 1956, at least, we all
took both tests.)



> Now in fact, this was the dreaded 11-plus. If you passed this exam (and it
> was designed so that about 20-30% would) you got a place at an academically
> motivated school which would prepare you for higher education - called a
> grammar school.

	Hmm.    The 'dreaded' eleven-plus.   Perhaps we should live in a
country where no-one is ever tested, and educational resources are scattered
at random.   Can you guess what the value of such an education system would be?
Can you imagine how well-educated everyone would be?

	By the way, Matthew's memory has let him down again here.   There was
also a thirteen-plus exam, to allow mis-categorised kids to moved from one
stream to another.

	I am a bit confused about just what point it is that Matthew is trying 
to make.   If the eleven-plus was as sudden-death as he says, then wouldn't 
that be just the kind of motivation that might work, and which Matthew appears 
to want.    The US has no eleven-plus, or equivalent, but you might give it a try. 
Rigorous testing seems to work just fine for the Japanese, and yet it seems to 
me that Japanese testing must also divide children who will receive more academic 
education, and children who will receive more practical education.   Are we 
going to say that it works for them, but not for us?



> If you failed it you went to a school which would train you to accept that
> you would always be a second-class citizen and you should not have ideas above
> your station - called a secondary modern.

	This is just wrong.   In the first place. there are, or were, three
categories, not two.    Besides grammar school, there were two alternative
tracks, one of which was a Secondary Modern school, and the other a Central school. 
Secondly, if kids were indoctrinated as he describes, who did it, the school?  
The bricks and mortar?   I doubt it.   If anyone was indoctrinating kids like 
this, then it would have to be the teachers.    I think you have to ask what 
kind of teachers would do that, not blithely assume that the system is at fault.
If teachers are doing this to children, then the same teachers in renamed schools
are not going to do any better.



> Kids whose parents were motivated and knew about the education system
> prepared them extensively for this exam, and they knew exactly that passing it
> would fundamentally determine their future lives. Kids like me from a rough
> area where parents saw school as a kind of child-watching service had no idea
> of its importance and could easily just mess about because they didn't feel like
> working that day, particularly since they'd been upset by being put in a
> strange environment.

	I lived in a rough area of London (Fulham) amongst people who existed 
from day to day on low wages, and we still managed to know what education was 
about.   We were (very) poor, but we were not lazy or foolish.   Coming from
a working class area is not the same thing as seeing education as child-watching,
If you have that kind of attitude towards your children's education, then you
have that attitude.    Implying that a working person automatically has that
attitude is a) insulting, and b) wrong.

	My mother was a widow who educated three sons while she worked as a 
secretary, at a time when women were even less well paid than they are now and 
all three of us made it to university.   Although she was a very kind woman, 
one thing that could provoke her anger was to see parents who were too uninformed 
or too lazy to get the best possible education for their children.   Education
was one of the things she talked most about, even though we lived in a two-room
'flat', with no TV, a radio that worked most of the time, and paraffin heating,
since gas was too expensive.   She figured that there was some excuse for being
poorly educated in a country where you have to pay to go to school, but no
excuse whatsoever in Britain, where the government pays you to be educated.

	Looking around me, I think she was right.    Silicon Valley is now
infested with well-educated Britons.  Of course, it was also possible to veg. 
out and get nothing at all, but it's possible to do that in any education 
system.  It's foolish to look back and say "The Tories done it to me, guv."


> If you came from a middle class home, it was pretty shocking if you failed the
> 11 plus.   If you came from a working class home it was pretty shocking if you 
> passed it. 

	That's funny, because passing it didn't cause any shock in my home.   I 
guess some people are more easily shocked than others.     Or maybe it is that 
some people have very low expectations of themselves, and when they fulfill them, 
they comfort themselves by blaming it on the 'system'.


> Needless to say the local grammar school was situated in a wealthy
> residential area, the secondary modern among cheaper housing.

	Which grammar school?    One particular one?   One that Matthew knows
about?    In London, grammar schools were in the community, where schools always
are, and they tended to be in the older, Victorian, school buildings, with poor
physical facilities.    The secondary Modern schools were often in new buildings,
with swimming pools and fancy laboratories.    The grammar school in Highbury, 
where I lived for a while, is on a bus route close to a body shop.

	Don't you love sentences that begin 'Needless to say'?   It means 'I 
hope you won't question this'.


> Although in most parts of England this system has now been abolished, there
> are plenty in the ruling Conservative party who want to bring it back, and
> they've already passed a law introducing regular tests at various age ranges
> in schools.

	I read that Maggie's policy is to allow the parents in each district 
to decide for themselves what school system they want, complete with a voucher 
system, if they want that.   Is that wrong?   Are the US papers telling me 
lies about that?   (Oh yes, the 'ruling' Conservative party.   Don't you mean 
the 'elected' Conservative party?)


> Also there are a lot of campaigns to bring it back, or in those few areas 
> which still have it, not to abolish it. Funnily enough, those campaigns always
> call themselves 'Save' or 'Restore' the grammar schools, whereas in fact what
> they want is to keep or bring back secondary moderns since that's where the
> majority of kids go to under the selection system.

	Ah, the anthropomorphised 'campaign' which is going to do something 
against everyone's will.    That must be something else the US press is lying
about.    I read that the British voters had just re-elected Maggie for, what is
it, the third time now?     I also read that getting back to a more traditional
school system has been part of the Tory platform for years.   Is Matthew saying
that the voters re-elected Maggie because they *didn't* approve of her policies,
or because they *did* approve of them?   Choose one.

	As you can probably guess, although Matthew has not made it quite
clear, education has become highly politicised in the UK over the last forty
years.    Labour party voters tend to support so-called 'comprehensive'
education, in which serious testing is delayed until university entry, and
Tory party supporters tend to like traditional education.   Unfortunately,
it has become one of the 'religious' political issues, like School Prayer in the
US, and people tend to damn one policy or another, without admitting that both
policies have some good and some not-so-good features.    In particular, people
tend to slough off their own responsibility in education onto the system, and
blame it for whatever happens to them.

	When I passed the eleven-plus, my mother calculated that she literally 
didn't have the money to pay for my uniform, books, bus fares, and school lunches. 
Guess who paid.    Yes, the wicked ruling party paid the whole shot, and gave 
me a grant in aid for the next six years until I went to university, whereupon 
they gave me another, larger, grant for a further three years until I graduated. 
As you can tell, I still feel grateful for that, which is why I resent seeing 
a very good education system trashed to make a cheap political point.

jon.