Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [411]
Many of the Bray techniques, in simplified and speeded-up form, are being used by the multitude of assessment organizations now operating on the Web.42 Bray has won six awards for his work as an applied psychologist, including one from the American Psychological Association, which presented him in 1991 with the Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology.
The Use and Misuse of Testing
The testing of job applicants by employers is only a small part of what is now one of psychology’s most extensive influences on American life. Each year scores of millions of Americans take standardized multiple-choice tests published by over a hundred companies, some of which are multi- multi-million-dollar enterprises. Thanks to the federal No Child Left Behind Law, in 2006 every student from the third to eighth grade and one high school grade had to take state tests—about 45 million in all. (It was estimated by the Government Accounting Office that states would spend anywhere from $1.9 billion to $5.3 billion from 2002 to 2008 to implement No Child Left Behind–mandated tests.43) Add to that all the IQ tests given in schools throughout the nation, the standardized tests required for certification in the professions, the tests administered to many would-be employees by companies, the SAT, ACT, and other tests that play a role in college admissions, the personality and other tests given to patients by psychotherapists, and many others, and it is evident that testing is one of psychology’s most successful applications to daily life. It has become a major means by which our society makes decisions about people’s lives in education, employment, physical and mental health treatment, the civil service, and the military. And even love and mating: A number of dating services now use personality and other tests to generate “matches” between people.44
Binet’s aim in developing intelligence tests, early in the century, was to benefit both the children and society by determining which children needed special education. Similarly, psychological and employment tests have always been basically diagnostic, meant to benefit the people being tested and those who deal with them. The extraordinary expansion of testing in the past several decades is evidence that it does serve these purposes. Testing is, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern society; schools, universities, large industries, government, and the military would be crippled and all but inoperable if they were suddenly deprived of the information they gain from it.
Yet testing can lend itself to misuse, the most serious example being the favoring of certain racial and economic groups and the handicapping of others. The obvious case in point is the effect of testing on the educational and employment opportunities of whites as compared with blacks, Hispanics, and other disadvantaged groups.
To people with an unqualified hereditarian view of human abilities, the use of intelligence and achievement tests poses no ethical problem. They believe that middle- and upper-class people do better on such tests, on the average, than lower-class people simply because they are better intellectually endowed by nature. As we saw, the followers of Galton were convinced that heredity accounts for the differences between the average scores on IQ and other mental tests of people of different classes and races. It was on