IQ Tests Are Not Culturally Biased

Although the left believes IQ tests culturally biased, the evidence according to Arthur Jensen in his book Bias in Mental Testing suggests otherwise:

…The book presents several arguments that IQ tests are not biased. African Americans’ lower average performance on IQ tests cannot be because of differences in vocabulary, because African Americans have slightly better performance on verbal tests than on nonverbal tests. The IQ difference also cannot be because the tests depend on White culture, or that Whites inevitably do better on tests designed by Whites. In fact, Blacks perform better on tests that are culturally loaded than they do on tests designed to not include cultural references unfamiliar to Blacks, and Japanese children tend to outscore White children by an average of six points. Nor can the difference be a reflection of socioeconomic status, because when Black and White children are tested who are at the same socioeconomic level, the difference between their average IQs is still twelve points.[2]

The book also presents evidence that IQ tests work the same way for all English-speaking Americans born in the United States, regardless of race. One is that IQ tests have been very successful in predicting performance for all Americans in school, work, and the armed forces. Another is that the race and sex of the person administering a test does not significantly affect how African Americans perform on it. The ranking in difficulty of test items on IQ tests is the same for both groups, and so is the overall shape of the graph showing the number of people achieving each score, except that the curve is centered slightly lower for Blacks than it is for Whites.[2]

A report by School Psychology Quarterly Bias in Mental Testing since Bias in Mental Testing agrees with Jensen’s findings:

One popular and longstanding claim is that mean differences are caused by
“cultural bias” in the tests. Arthur Jensen exhaustively reviewed the empirical literature on
the issue of test bias, which resulted in his seminal book, Bias in Mental Testing (BIMT),
published in 1980. On the basis of empirical criteria for evaluating test bias, Jensen concluded
that standardized aptitude/ability tests predict equally well for American-born, English-speaking
majority and minority subgroups and measure similar constructs. This paper
summarizes the major conclusions from BIMT and evaluates writing on test bias published
since BIMT. We conclude that empirical research to date consistently finds that standardized
cognitive tests are not biased in terms of predictive and construct validity. Furthermore, continued
claims of test bias, which appear in academic journals, the popular media, and some
psychology textbooks, are not empirically justified. These claims of bias should be met with
skepticism and evaluated critically according to established scientific principles.

So now you have the left dismissing college in much they same way they dismiss IQ tests. If some people score low, it’s because of racism or some imagined external factor, not because of innate individual cognitive differences. For the left, the modus operandi, again, is the same: blame large external targets (society, the economy, college, technology…) for individual deficits and differences that are biological in nature, not external.