Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

Technical Misconceptions and Obfuscations 61
as a whole.) As evidence for an environmental explanation of racial
differences, Klineberg (1963, p. 200) also points to an isolated
group of impoverished white children living in the hollows of
the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia who had an average IQ
lower than the Negro national mean. But of course genetic differences
in intelligence among subgroups of the white population are
no less improbable than differences among racial groups, and this
would seem especially true of relatively isolated groups in the
‘hollows’ of Appalachia. The fact that the Army Alpha is highly
loaded with scholastic knowledge, correlating close to 0-70 with
number of years of schooling, means that it probably reflects
regional differences in mean level of education to some degree,
independently of intelligence, especially in the period of World
War I, when there wras much greater regional variance in the
quality and the number of years of schooling than exists at the
present time.
Since a much greater degree of equality of educational opportunity,
school facilities, and curricula has come about nationwide
in the half-century since World War I, it should be interesting to
bring up to date the point that Klineberg made with World War I
Army Alpha scores by looking at the most recently available
Selective Service Test results.
Under the system of Selective Service virtually all American
male youths, on becoming eighteen years of age, are required to
take the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), a rather typical
self-administered paper-and-pencil test of general intelligence.
Specifically, the AFQT was designed (1) to ‘measure a person’s
ability to absorb military training within reasonable limits of time,
in order to eliminate those who do not have such ability’, and
(2) ‘to provide a uniform measure of general usefulness in the
services of those who qualified on the test’ (Karpinos, 1962, p. 10).
The test consists of 100 questions equally distributed in four
areas: vocabulary (ability to handle words and understand verbal
concepts), arithmetic (ability to reason with numbers and solve
simple mathematical problems), spatial relations (ability to distinguish
forms and patterns), and mechanical ability (ability to
interrelate tools and equipment). On the basis of AFQT scores,
examinees are classified into five groups ranging in mental ability
from very rapid learners (mental group I) to very slow learners
(mental group V), according to the following percentiles: