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Sunday, January 15, 2006

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IQ and the army

As both a psychometrician and as a former Australian army psychologist, I suppose I should say something about the controversial Fred Kaplan article on lowered IQ standards for US Army recruits. I am not going to say much because I think Kaplan is spot-on -- though he does manage to write his whole article without using the term "IQ" once. As even Leftist commentators such as Kevin Drum have acknowledged, however, the "aptitude" test the U.S. Army uses to evaluate potential recruits is essentially an IQ test.

Kaplan does in fact do a useful job of summarizing the evidence for how important IQ is among soldiers. The idea that you can use any dummy as "cannon-fodder" is very much out of date. Putting a deadly weapon into the hands of a dummy is likely to make him more a danger to his fellow-soldiers than to the enemy. Modern soldiering in particular ideally requires a high level of intelligence. So the "validity" (usefulness, correctness, informativeness) of IQ tests is not confined to predicting educational achievement but also extends into fields very different from classroom performance -- to fields such as military efficiency. And that is why we have the term IQ -- because there IS a general factor of mental (or problem-solving) ability. There IS such a thing as a general factor of intelligence that shows up in a wide variety of situations.

So the fact that the US army is now recruiting less bright people to fill its ranks is a very bad thing indeed. It will tend to make the army less effective and more self destructive -- as if we did not have a big enough "friendly-fire" problem already! I think the US army should learn the ancient lesson of Gideon (Judges chapter 7) and stick with high standards no matter what.

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posted by JR at 5:50 PM