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Comment: Minette Marrin
How dumb of Cambridge to rely on an intelligence test

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by Minette Marrin
The Sunday Times
September 28, 2003


A very confused idea took root in 19th and 20th - century thinking, with tragic consequences. It’s the idea that meritocracy is fair, and that we can have both meritocracy and fairness at the same time.

This is nonsense, of course. Merit is not distributed fairly and the rewards of merit will also therefore be unfairly distributed. But along with some of the higher apes we seem to have an innate sense of fairness, meaning equality. Like chimpanzees, we instinctively feel we are of equal worth and that we should, in fairness, be treated equally. Perhaps we should, but life isn’t like that; monkeys probably have to learn the hard way too.

This old-fashioned muddle is what lies behind the ludicrous developments in education in this country. We have reached a point when Cambridge, our best university, feels obliged to set an intelligence test, announced last week, to cut a swathe through the many thousands of candidates with masses of meaningless A grades in the debased A-level exam.

This is partly Cambridge’s own fault for abandoning in 1987, in a fit of astonishingly muddled thinking, its old entrance exam and using only A-level results. The old exam served very well to select, from the many intelligent teenagers who applied, the very few suited to academic education.

Nobody thought then that this had much to do with A-level results, which didn’t then (and don’t now) test for a truly intellectual cast of mind or true academic ability.

Even more than Cambridge University’s loss of nerve, however, the chaos of university entrance today has much more to do with idiotic government intervention — largely Labour, but also Conservative — that tried to impose this notion of fairness on universities in the belief that practically everybody ought to have, and is therefore suited to, a university education.

There follows the government’s daft plan to send 50% of school-leavers to university. This is already well on the way to destroying Britain’s universities — hence Cambridge’s desperate remedy — and is weighing down thousands of sensible, capable young things with pointless debt for pointless degrees.

It is also destroying Tony Blair’s chances of a reconciliation with his party this week, post-Iraq. Ironically, to pay for this overexpansion of student numbers, the government is proposing higher tuition fees. That infuriates the egalitarians in Blair’s party.

In our culture the best kind of merit is intelligence. In other eras other kinds, such as being amazing at sword play or killing foreigners, were more useful and much more highly rewarded. Even today, being brilliant at violent physical exertion is still a very well-rewarded form of merit — as with football or boxing. But what most people want is intelligence. Not to have it is to be a loser in the lottery of life.

So to suggest to large numbers of people — probably 85% of the population — that they are not intelligent enough to go to a serious university is to tell them that they have all drawn a losing ticket. This is clearly judgmental, exclusive and unacceptable and it is a truth too beastly even for the Tory party to name.

However, my view is that it is not as beastly as it sounds. It is not, I believe, to decry the intelligence — the merit — of all those people. What makes this subject painful is our confusion and our unquestioned assumptions about the nature of intelligence. I think it might be less painful if people thought and spoke more carefully — more intelligently — about it.

This is an area where fools rush in and angels fear to tread, and I certainly intend to tackle it. For it seems obvious to me (and science appears to be confirming this) that intelligence is not monolithic at all. It appears in different forms.

That is not to agree with the comforting old platitude about everybody being good at something. Sadly, that’s not true. There are, at the extremes, total winners and total losers. But I believe increasingly that intelligence is highly specialised and that people who are gifted in one respect may not be so in others.

Those who are good at verbal reasoning may be very poor at understanding numbers. There are even autistic people who are very limited cognitively in most respects but outstanding in one, such as calculation, like Raymond Babbitt in the film Rain Man.

The general intelligence quotient, the old IQ test, is very crude, as people on the left have always argued (though it ought to be admitted that, crudely speaking, it is still the best indicator of future success across a population). It tests a range of cognitive skills and takes an average of the result; obviously it has considerable use, but it tends to underestimate people with very uneven abilities — those who are extremely high in one area, but poor in others.

And these people are sometimes the individuals with most — the highest intelligence, the highest merit — to offer. So a low general IQ, though discouraging, does not mean a person lacks intelligence. That person might in some respects be quite or even very intelligent.

I’ve been forced to think about this very hard in my own life. My sister suffered brain damage at birth and as a result has learning difficulties (or a mental handicap, as people used to say). Yet she has one or two very exceptional cognitive abilities, although other difficulties make it more or less impossible for her to make much use of them.

Others among my family and friends are pretty intelligent, by conventional standards, but others still, though apparently very intelligent, have astonishing cognitive blips and are therefore what would once have been called “thick”. It is interesting to see, as I have, detailed results of children’s cognitive testing that show one score way high and another way low — something that almost all schools would fail to pick up.

Then again, we can all think of people whose abilities have somehow fallen on thorny ground — not just through lack of opportunity, or bad luck, but through the difficulties of their own temperaments. Personality is crucial to intelligence.

You could almost say that personality is an aspect of intelligence. It determines what use you make of the cognitive aptitudes you have.

It is a foolish misunderstanding of intelligence to relate it to a university upper second and force everybody to jump through the wrong hoops. Presumably it has to do with another egalitarian error — that everybody must have the same status and everyone must therefore be a “professional”. The notion has been dumbed down accordingly; we are all professional now, or think we ought to be.

This is a tragic and cruel misunderstanding of the varieties of human ability. What our education system ought to be doing is trying to develop our many and various aptitudes — most of them useful, interesting and worthy of respect — rather than trying to push people into thinking they are something they are not.

It is very unfair to us all, to our different hopes of self-expression and achievement and to real respect for our true merits. Cambridge University’s rather desperate brain teaser test ought to ring alarm bells everywhere.



© Minette Marrin/The Sunday Times, London,28
September 2003.

The Sunday Times
www.sunday-times.co.uk