Inspired by the efforts of French psychologist Alfred Binet, who in 1904 designed a measure to determine students at risk of failure in school so that those students could receive remedial attention, there emerged what came to be known as intelligence tests which yielded a number defined as a person’s intelligence quotient or IQ. This and related tests were developed using the population of enlisted men during the First World War, and this group of white, middle-class males came to be the “norm” to which all other individuals and groups were compared.

Mental measurement and scientifically grounded assessment tools were part of a general movement at the beginning of the twentieth century to develop a “science of education,” which reflected the obsession of schools and culture with the efficiency of production at that time. As schools became like factories, and under pressure from a taxpaying public (whose money supports public education), school administrators needed clean, fast, relatively inexpensive and accurate ways of measuring their schools’ products. The Educational Testing Service, founded in 1947 with the support of the Carnegie Foundation, emerged as (and has remained) the primary regulator of students’ access to learning at all levels and to professional opportunities beyond school through their production and control of standardized tests. These include the SATS (Scholastic Aptitude Tests), LCATS (law), MCATS (medicine) and GREs (graduate school).

Standardized tests are mass-produced, primarily multiple-choice, criterion-referenced tests administered to students individually and en masse under highly regulated (timed, directed, monitored) conditions as early as preschool and regularly (as often as several times a year) subsequently. These tests are intended to measure students’ aptitude and achievement, and they are used to compare and sort individuals and groups of students within and across classes, grade levels and schools.

In recent years, there has been substantial debate about the efficacy and fairness of standardized tests. Advocates argue that what American education lacks is rigor, high standards of excellence and effective measures for holding schools and students accountable. Because they judge all students according to the same criteria, standardized tests appear to offer “scientific” data upon which to make educational decisions, and thus they are thought by some to be objective and fair.

Critics argue that the tests are biased in terms of race, class, gender and other forms of diversity and that they offer an unfair advantage to those students whose home and community experiences most closely parallel the middle class, Anglo-American values generally emphasized in public schools which were established as the norm over eighty years ago through the first IQ tests. Furthermore, critics argue that standardized tests reinforce meritocratic competitiveness, fear of failure, curricular influence and manipulation by those who create the tests, over-emphasis on results and a trivialization of knowledge in their emphasis of facts (as opposed to critical thinking).

The basic disagreement is that proponents of standardized tests argue that the scores reflect students’ intelligence and potential, and critics argue that the tests reflect the biases of those who design them and serve to reinforce the inequities inherent in the status quo.