31-2 What are the traits of those at the low and high intelligence extremes?

One way to glimpse the validity and significance of any test is to compare people who score at the two extremes of the normal curve. The two groups should differ noticeably, and they do.

At one extreme of the intelligence test normal curve are those with unusually low scores. To be diagnosed with an intellectual disability (formerly referred to as mental retardation), a person must meet two criteria. The first is a low test score. American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities guidelines specify performance that is approximately two standard deviations below average (Schalock et al., 2010). For an intelligence test with 100 as average and a standard deviation of 15, that means (allowing for some variation in one’s test score) an intelligence score of approximately 70 or below. The second criterion is that the person must have difficulty adapting to the normal demands of independent living, as expressed in three areas:

Intellectual disability is a developmental condition that is apparent before age 18, sometimes with a known physical cause. Down syndrome, for example, is a disorder of varying severity caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 in the person’s genetic makeup.

Consider one reason why people diagnosed with a mild intellectual disability—those just below the 70 score—might be better able to live independently today than many decades ago, when they were institutionalized. Over the years, thanks to the Flynn effect, the tests have been periodically restandardized. As that happened, individuals who scored near 70 on earlier tests have suddenly lost about 6 test-score points. Two people with the same ability level could thus be classified differently, depending on when they were tested (Kanaya et al., 2003; Reynolds et al., 2010). As the intellectual disability boundary has shifted, more people have become eligible for special education and for Social Security payments.

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And in the United States (one of only a few industrialized countries with the death penalty), fewer people are now eligible for execution: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that the execution of people with an intellectual disability is “cruel and unusual punishment.” For people near the cutoff score of 70, intelligence testing can be a high-stakes competition. And so it was for Teresa Lewis, a “dependent personality” with limited intellect, who was executed by the state of Virginia in 2010. Lewis, whose reported test score was 72, allegedly agreed to a plot in which two men killed her husband and stepson in exchange for a split of a life insurance payout (Eckholm, 2010). If only she had scored 69.

In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the imprecision and arbitrariness of a fixed cutoff score of 70, and required states with death row inmates who have scored just above 70 to consider other evidence. Thus, Ted Herring, who had scored 72 and 74 on intelligence tests—but without knowing that summer follows spring or how to transfer between buses—could be taken off Florida’s death row (Alvarez & Schwartz, 2014).

In one famous project begun in 1921, Lewis Terman studied more than 1500 California schoolchildren with IQ scores over 135. Contrary to the popular notion that intellectually gifted children are frequently maladjusted, Terman’s high-scoring children (the “Termites”), like those in later studies, were healthy, well-adjusted, and unusually successful academically (Friedman & Martin, 2012; Koenen et al., 2009; Lubinski, 2009a). When restudied over the next seven decades, most people in Terman’s group had attained high levels of education (Austin et al., 2002; Holahan & Sears, 1995). Many were doctors, lawyers, professors, scientists, and writers, though no Nobel Prize winners.

A more recent study of precocious youths who had aced the math SAT at age 13—by scoring in the top quarter of 1 percent of their age group—found them at age 33 twice as likely to have patents as were those in the bottom quarter of the top 1 percent (Wai et al., 2005). Compared with the math aces, 13-year-olds scoring high on verbal aptitude were, by age 38, more likely to have become humanities professors or written a novel (Kell et al., 2013). About 1 percent of Americans earn doctorates. But among those scoring in the top 1 in 10,000—on the SAT at age 12 or 13—63 percent had done so.

One of psychology’s whiz kids was Jean Piaget, who by age 15 was publishing scientific articles on mollusks and who went on to become the twentieth century’s most famous developmental psychologist (Hunt, 1993). Children with extraordinary academic gifts are sometimes more isolated, shy, and in their own worlds (Winner, 2000). But most thrive.

There are critics who question many of the assumptions of “gifted child” programs, such as the belief that only 3 to 5 percent of children are gifted and that it pays to identify and “track” these special few—segregating them in special classes and giving them academic enrichment not available to their peers. Critics note that tracking by aptitude sometimes creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: Those implicitly labeled “ungifted” may be influenced to become so (Lipsey & Wilson, 1993; Slavin & Braddock, 1993). Denying lower-ability students opportunities for enriched education can widen the achievement gap between ability groups and increase their social isolation from one another (Carnegie, 1989; Stevenson & Lee, 1990). Because minority and low-income youth are more often placed in lower academic groups, tracking can also promote segregation and prejudice—hardly, note critics, a healthy preparation for working and living in a multicultural society.

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Critics and proponents of gifted education do, however, agree on this: Children have differing gifts, whether at math, verbal reasoning, art, or social leadership. Some children exhibit exceptional potential or talent in a given domain. Educating children as if all were alike is as naive as assuming that giftedness is something, like blue eyes, that you either have or do not have. One need not hang labels on children to affirm their special talents and to challenge them all at the frontiers of their own ability and understanding. By providing appropriate placement suited to each child’s talents (as when allowing a math whiz to study math at a higher level), we can promote both equity and excellence for all (Subotnik et al., 2011).