A school problem, not a hunt for “genius”
In early-20th-century France, schools needed a way to notice children who were having trouble keeping up and might benefit from additional instruction. Psychologist Alfred Binet and physician Théodore Simon designed a series of tasks to help teachers identify those pupils. The test was meant to guide support, not to decide who was capable of learning or to rank every child’s worth.
From answers to an estimate of development
The tasks sampled abilities such as remembering, understanding words, and solving simple problems. Binet and Simon compared how children of different ages typically handled them. A child’s pattern of answers could then suggest whether their performance was closer to what was common at a younger or older age. This was a rough educational clue, not a direct measurement of an inborn quantity called intelligence.
That distinction mattered: the practical question was what kind of help a student might need. A score could draw attention to a mismatch between a child’s current skills and classroom demands, but it could not explain the cause. Limited schooling, language differences, illness, or unfamiliarity with the tasks could affect performance too.
How a support tool became a sorting tool
Once the test produced a number, it was tempting to treat that number as a permanent summary of a person. Later versions and uses helped make IQ testing a broader way to compare and classify people, far beyond the classroom problem Binet and Simon had set out to address. The shift was from using test results to ask what help a child needed to using them to judge how people ranked against one another.
That history is why a test score needs context: it describes performance on particular tasks under particular conditions, not the full range of a person’s abilities or potential.
