Skip to content
Who's in the Video
Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D., is a humanistic psychologist exploring the depths of human potential. He has taught courses on intelligence, creativity, and well-being at Columbia University, NYU, the University of[…]
Standardized testing is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. It’s not totally useless, but it does misunderstand the situation. The Imagination Institute’s Scott Barry Kaufman suggests a more three-dimensional search for intelligence.
5 min
with

You can apply this to almost every field and human pursuit and it’s still true: too much of one thing rarely yields a positive outcome. Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of The Imagination Institute, thinks the US has fallen into this trap with standardized testing, which lacks insight into the breadth of intelligence.


Giving everyone the same test is advantageous for measuring learning outcomes, but when that data is used to label intelligence and identify gifted students it gets into questionable territory. It’s a limited radar that leaves bright minds by the wayside. Kaufman has developed an alternative theory of personal intelligence, where someone’s potential is assessed not by a single, assumed measure of intelligence like a standardized exam or IQ test, but by the combination of traits that in each person is as unique as a fingerprint. Someone with so-called “average” smarts may enhance their potential with extraordinary grit or perseverance that could see them succeed more than someone whose intelligence technically measures higher. What makes us complete beings is this interplay of all our characteristics, not merely how we may present on paper. The hazard of the standardized method is that it can obscure – and squander – potential with its one-dimensional approach. Kaufman isn’t prepared to throw out the baby with the bathwater however; there is still value in standardized testing, but it cannot stand alone.

Our education system suffers from the illusion that gifted minds are a rarity, but the more likely scenario may be that our current testing methods are grossly inefficient at finding it.

Scott Barry Kaufman’s book is Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind.


Related