The Agility Quotient: Why we need to move on from IQ and EQ

"When France began mandatory education for all children in the late 1800s, it required a way to assess the "mental age" of students to properly place them in the right classrooms. Two French psychologists, Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, leaped at the invitation and created the first-ever practical intelligence test. Since then, the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale has inspired countless other researchers, including Lewis Terman, who transformed the original framework into the Stanford-Binet Test, the standard IQ assessment in the United States for most of the 20th century."

"Terman believed that high IQ indicated genius, and he sought to prove this with a study he launched in 1921 that tracked 1,528 kids with IQ scores over 135, following them for their entire lives as they grew from children to adults, with the research ending only when they died. Active for more than eighty years, Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius was the longest-running study in the history of psychology."

"At first, the results proved Terman's belief in the power of IQ. These ultraintelligent children, affectionately dubbed Termites, grew into generally healthy and successful adults who finished college, registered patents, and published papers at far higher rates than their counterparts of average intelligence. However, as time went on, these differentiators diminished. The vast majority of Terman's Termites grew into regular people: engineers, typists, lawyers, filing clerks, and police officers. Not a single Termite became a Nobel Prize winner or a world-famous artist. In fact, two future Nobel laureates, Luis Alvarez and William Shockley, were rejected from Terman's study because their IQ scores weren't high enough."

When France instituted mandatory education in the late 1800s, psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon created the first practical intelligence test to assess students' mental age for classroom placement. The Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale inspired later assessments, including Lewis Terman's Stanford-Binet. Terman launched a longitudinal study in 1921 of 1,528 children with IQs above 135 and tracked them for more than eighty years. Early results showed higher rates of college completion, patents, and publications among participants. Over time those differences diminished: most participants became ordinary professionals, and none became Nobel laureates; some future laureates had been excluded due to lower IQ scores.

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