My Skepticism about Standardized Testing:  From the father of “MI” 

I am often asked about assessing the multiple intelligences: Wouldn’t it be great if we could administer a battery of tests, at the end of which one could give all persons their “MI profile?”

While respecting those who have attempted to create “MI tests,” I have hesitations about this aspiration. To be sure, we have adequate tests of linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence; and there are assessments which are at least relevant for some of the other intelligences. But I have been dubious about the whole “testing route”—because all too often it involves snap judgments based on a few targeted items, rather than a full-fledged and well-rounded picture of a person’s cognitive strengths—and challenges. 

This skepticism cloaks a personal paradox. On the one hand, as a young person, I was a very good test taker—I did well on SATs, GREs, and, presumably, IQ tests. Yet at the same time, I have also been a staunch critic of standardized tests and have been actively involved in the creation of alternative forms of assessment.

One reason for the critical attitude is presented in my recently published memoir. Let me quote the relevant passage here: 

In 1956, the year of my bar mitzvah, my parents took me on a five-day trip to Hoboken, New Jersey, to have me “tested.” My parents had a bright child on their hands and, as immigrants who had not themselves received a higher education, evidently did not quite know what to do with me. I stood out with respect both to perfor­mance on schoolwork and to my prowess on the piano (no one cared about drilling!) I hasten to add that I stood out in Scranton, Pennsylvania, then a city of no more than a hundred thousand per­sons, many elderly, with perhaps a thousand youngsters in my age range. There is no way of knowing whether I would have stood out in a larger and less economically depressed area. In any event, vari­ous family friends, as well as teachers and the rabbi, had suggested to my parents that I receive informed advice from trained experts. For a few hundred dollars, one could take a full battery of psycholog­ical tests at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

I have only the dimmest memory of the testing itself. It took a number of days and involved a variety of instruments. I have made several attempts to secure the actual test results or at least a list of the kinds of tests that were administered in the middle 1950s, but to no avail. I suspect that I received a full gamut of cognitive tests and, in all probability, also measures of personality, motivation, occupa­tional skills and aspirations, and other psychological constructs of the day.

But one scene is permanently etched in my memory. On the last day, we were called into the chief clinician’s office, and there I heard sentences to this effect: “Mr. and Mrs. Gardner, Howard is a bright child. He can probably do most anything. But he has special gifts in the clerical area.” 

These words stunned me. I had been presented with literally doz­ens of instruments and had filled them out patiently and carefully. But apparently where I stood out, did especially well was in tasks that I considered, and still consider, completely mindless. In a prototypi­cal clerical test, the subject has to look at long strings of numbers or letters and cross out all that belong—or do not belong—to a specific category (say, cross out all of the t’s or every other even number). This is a task that any trained monkey or pigeon could presumably have carried out, and today of course we would allocate such tasks to simple pattern-recognizing devices. Why had my family traveled for a week, spent hundreds of dollars (the equivalent of a few thousand dollars today), to learn something that anyone could have easily seen and that—as far I could tell—had absolutely no bearing on future career or life choices that I might or should make? As far as I was concerned, Hoboken was hokum!

The other day I had a frustrating experience which resurfaced the reasons for my skepticism re standardized testing. To enter Harvard’s campus these days, one needs to go to a website, called “Crimson Clear,” and answer a set of questions. I’ve been doing this unproblematically for several weeks. But last week, I was summarily rejected. This experience was frustrating; I needed to go into my office, I had no symptoms, and I wondered what had gone wrong. It was necessary—and anxiety-provoking to wait until the next day to find out. It turns out that I had read (or more precisely skimmed) one question too quickly and had answered “yes” rather than “no.” Not to be mysterious—the question read “Have you been within six feet of anyone who has tested positively for the virus?” Of course, I would not have tried to enter campus had I been exposed to someone with COVID. But being in a hurry, I had just glanced at the question and spit out an answer that was wrong!

An advocate of tests might properly respond “Well, we want to know whether you read carefully, and you don’t.”  And certainly, if I had been taking a college entrance or some other high-stake exam, I would have been more prudent. But in general, when it comes to high-stake situations—whether it involves gaining admission to college, avoiding getting seriously ill, or infecting others—I opt for another “more authentic” means of assessment.