Testing for Competence Rather Than

¶ … Testing for Competence Rather Than for Intelligence'") is that it was published in 1973, thirty-seven years ago. The second and third things noticed are that McClelland is a Harvard University Psychology professor and that the article was published in a prominent scholarly journal, American Psychologist. So in fairness, one has to take into account the year this was published and not pass judgment on things McClelland says that are by now well out of date.

That having been said, it is ironic that McClelland is raging against intelligence tests that were used in determining whether a high school graduate was qualified to get into colleges and universities. Those kinds of tests are not used with as much regularity today as they were thirty-seven years ago, but there are new problems with tests that McClelland could not possibly have known about.

For example, the federal legislation called No Child Left Behind -- signed into law in 2002 -- has stirred a great deal of passion because schools that don't improve or that continually fail to teach students up to a minimum level can lose their federal funding. It would be interesting to know what McClelland has to say about No Child Left Behind, albeit he passed away in 1968 (leaving behind a sterling reputation for his work on human motivational issues). On page 4 of his article McClelland writes that a ghetto dweller in Roxbury (Boston) takes a test to qualify to become a policeman. But that person didn't pass the test because he didn't know key words like "lexicon," "quell" and "pyromaniac." McClelland wrote:

"Because you do not know those words, you are considered to have low intelligence, and since you consequently have to take a low-status job and are unhappy, you contribute to the celebrated correlations of low intelligence with low occupational status and poor adjustment. Psychologists should be ashamed of themselves for promoting a view of general intelligence that has encouraged such a testing program, particularly when there is no solid evidence that significantly relates performance on this type of intelligence test with performance as a policeman" (McClelland, 1973, p. 4).

Now, these years later, one can take aim at another kind of test that likely McClelland, were he alive, would also criticize. The test at issue here is the kind of testing that schools are required to go through to see if they meet stringent requirements set by No Child Left Behind. The problem isn't just the tests, it's the teachers who have to prove that they have done an adequate job of teaching students. So, they "teach to the test," and it is a sham in many cases because kids are not learning to solve problems or think innovatively; rather, in those cases, kids are just being grilled on certain subjects that teachers know will be on the tests that the students must take to prove the school is worthy of federal monies.

In fact, the No Child Left Behind legislation is up for renewable this year, and there are rumblings that the revised legislation will include a "pay-for-performance" clause; teachers will be paid based on the quality of what their students learn.

It is all well and good in one sense for the school district to launch a pay-for-performance system in order to get the most out of the teachers -- who in turn are motivated to get the most out of the students -- but how are the executives in a district going to determine the amount of value that a teacher adds to the school?

If the teacher simply "teaches to the test" -- an all-to-common approach in some schools -- it will be basically cheating a pay-for-performance system. A teacher "teaches to the test" by knowing ahead of time the specifics of the questions, issues and subjects to be covered in the end-of-school-year examination. With that information at hand, the teacher in this particular school pounds the answers to those questions into the student's heads so they do well on the test. Doing this will do damage to the credibility of schools, of the teaching profession -- and worse yet, teaching to the test is robbing young people of the education they should be receiving.

Meanwhile, McClelland (p. 6) writes, "But now we have an alternative explanation of college-going -- namely, socioeconomic status which seems to be as good a predictor of this type of success as ability." Speaking of socioeconomic status and how that paves the way for admission to colleges and universities -- or, conversely, keeps low income students out of good four-year schools -- an article in America's Untapped Resource (Carnevale, et al., 2004) carefully researched college and universities' admissions between 1979 and 2000. The findings would line up very nearly perfectly with McClelland's as far as the unfairness that befalls young people on the short end of the financial stick.