[redthrowaway]

Race, religion, political association, and the like are all socioeconomic factors which have been shown to have an effect on an individual's score on an IQ test.

The classic example goes as follows:

The testee is shown four pictures: a teapot; a saucer; a table, and a water pump. They are then shown a teacup, and asked to match it with the appropriate picture. The upper-class testee, for whom tea was always served in a cup on a saucer, selects the saucer. The middle-class testee selects the teapot, as the tea obviously goes in the cup. The child in sub-Saharan Africa recognizes the teacup as a cup, a so selects the water pump, as water goes in cups.

This is obviously a contrived example, but it shows how the biases of the test-makers can conflict with those of the test-takers, leading those from different backgrounds to score worse on the test.

[MartinCron]

A real example I heard of a few years ago was with children putting picture story panels in order.

The "correct sequence" was: Get Up, Eat Breakfast, Go To School while many of these children were getting subsidized breakfasts at school.

[noduerme]

I think anyone with an IQ over 80 would agree that's more of a red herring than a test of actual intelligence, so, if we can dispense with absurd fringe examples of the abuse of the concept of "IQ" maybe we can get down to the nuts of what companies are looking for, what programmers are trying to provide, and put a stop to this dramatic yarn about "how hard it is to find good help" once and for all.

[MartinCron]

The example was for small children and speaks more to the fact that IQ tests are in practice more discriminatory than they are designed to be. That's all.

[derleth]

If you can come up with a way to test for general intelligence without inadvertently biasing your tool in favor of a specific ethnicity, social class, or gender we're all ears.

[barry-cotter]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravens_Progressive_Matrices

[Daniel_Newby]

Curiously, American minorities score more poorly on culture-neutral tests like Raven's Matrices. They do better on culturally biased tests because they can pick up mainstream culture knowledge from TV and movies.

[dalore]

Couldn't you argue that race, religion and/or political association and the like have an affect on programming tests also?