Shankar Vedantam

He quietly transferred into the psychology department.

Soon, he was learning about intelligence and the science of IQ tests.

His goal from the very start was to tear down the edifice of IQ testing, but he felt he had to go into the lion's den first in order to tear it down.

By the time he was 20, Scott had talked his way into a spot at Cambridge University in England, working with one of the most prominent researchers on the science of intelligence.

What are you doing, Scott?

What are you doing?

But Scott's mentor, Nick McIntosh, set him at ease.

Scott didn't tell Nick about his own experience with IQ tests.

He was still ashamed.

Studying under Nick, Scott started to learn about the deep history of IQ tests, starting with Alfred Binet, a French psychologist.

In 1904, Alfred Binet was charged by the French government with devising a test.

The idea was to direct resources to kids who needed help in school.

Alfred Binet made it very clear what he thought the test could and could not measure.

He wrote that.

Instead, it was the Americans who fell in love with Alfred Binet's test.

And they used it to measure the very thing the French psychologist had warned against.

They used it to assess intelligence.

The psychologist Lewis Terman at Stanford was among those who transformed Binet's test in the United States.

Instead of being used as a tool to direct resources to kids who needed help, he turned the test into a tracking tool to identify the gifted.

Lewis Terman drew on the work of German psychologist William Stern and helped popularize the notion of something called an intelligence quotient, what we now know today as IQ.