A blistering rebuttal to the BBC’s recent case against IQ testing argues the corporation got nearly every point wrong, as Timothy Bates, a professor of differential psychology at the University of Edinburgh, writes for Aporia Magazine.
Bates is responding to BBC Science Focus reporter Claire Asher, who argued IQ scores should be scrapped because they oversimplify a complex trait. Bates counters that the opposite is true: the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, a leading IQ test, recently expanded from 15 subtests to 17, precisely because researchers insist on measuring cognition from many angles. Those tasks reliably correlate with each other, producing what psychologists call the g-factor, a general intelligence measure that captures roughly half the variance in cognitive performance and reliably predicts outcomes in school, work, and life.
Bates is particularly unsparing about the BBC’s supporting arguments. “The lengths of whataboutery in IQ hit pieces is, to be honest, staggering,” he writes, dismissing the notion that a poor score “might” become a self-fulfilling prophecy as speculative reasoning stacked against decades of predictive data. He also rejects the claim that IQ correlates only loosely with academic achievement, noting the two are linked at .80 when measured as latent factors.
On the more contentious question of national IQ comparisons, Bates points to large-scale assessments like PISA and TIMSS, which he says confirm smaller IQ studies rather than undermine them. He closes by tying the debate to U.S. college admissions, where schools that dropped the SAT — “which functions as a very good IQ test” — have struggled to identify capable students. “IQ scores out-predict all other measures of performance,” he writes, concluding that ability tests are one of the few objective tools available to people from disadvantaged backgrounds seeking to prove their talent.
