Robert Sternberg’s recent article in Inside Higher Ed argues that COVID-19 has

shown more clearly than ever that IQ tests and other tests of their ilk, such as the SAT
or ACT, are not valid indicators of the type of intelligence that actually matters.
According to Sternberg, intelligence is the ability to adapt to the environment. 
Howard Gardner comments:
COVID-19 certainly explodes any test or textbook notion of intelligence. As you may
know, I've maintained that IQ-type tests look at the combination of linguistic and
logical intelligence, with a dollop of spatial intelligence sometimes tossed in. They are
fine predictors of who could be a law professor—and indeed, perhaps, a Talmud
scholar. But they have little to do with recognizing and solving many “real-life”
problems, opening up few fields of knowledge, doing the right thing, or choosing the
better alternative in difficult circumstances. That's left lots of room for scholars like
Robert Sternberg and me to busy ourselves with.
Sterberg’s article from Inside Higher Ed is reproduced in full below.
COVID-19 Has Taught Us What Intelligence Really Is
Roberg J. Sternberg | August 31, 2020 
COVID-19 has taught us something important about intelligence. It’s not just that we
can get by without IQ-test proxies like the SAT and ACT that go by a number of
different names to avoid being called IQ tests. (Research by Douglas K. Detterman,
professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, and others shows that
these tests are essentially disguised tests of general intelligence.) It’s not that such
tests administered online at home will almost certainly be invalid. Rather, it’s that the
tests never measured what’s important in the first place, and we should have known
better. Actually, we did know better.
Ever since psychologists started measuring intelligence, including the academic skills
measured by IQ tests and their proxies, they have known that intelligence is not really
your ability to solve obscure multiple-choice problems with largely trivial content that
will have no impact on your future life whatsoever. Instead, intelligence is the ability
to adapt to the environment.
And that’s what Alfred Binet and David Wechsler, the founders of the intelligence test
movement, said. Any evolutionary theorist should be able to tell you that: organisms
that don’t adapt die. Species that don’t adapt die off. That’s also the consensus of
psychologists in scholarly symposia that have sought to understand what intelligence
is. Trivial academic problems don’t measure well your ability to adapt to the
environment.
Why are these tests such mediocre measures of your ability to adapt to the
environment -- of true intelligence? Compare a real problem, like that of dealing with
COVID-19, to the characteristics of standardized-test problems. The characteristics
of real-world problems are entirely different from the characteristics of problems on
standardized tests. Standardized test problems are mostly multiple choice or short
answer and have a right or wrong answer. Real problems require extended answers;
there is no perfect answer, and sometimes, not even a very good one. Standardized
test problems are decontextualized, emotionally bland and have no real-life stakes.
Real-world problems are highly contextualized, emotionally arousing and may have
high stakes. Standardized test problems are solved quickly and then you are done;
real-life ones often take a long time and, after you think you have solved them, often
come back.
Most important, real-world problems require you actively to deploy your intelligence
-- to decide seriously to use it. Standardized tests measure an inert form of
intelligence -- one that may exist in your head somewhere but is rarely actually put
into real-world use. Intelligence is not just about an inert ability to take tests; it is
about the active deployment of that ability to solve problems of life.
In research in my labs at Yale and Cornell Universities on intelligence as adaptive
knowledge and skills, we have consistently found, over a period of many years, that
scores on academic types of tests do not show much positive correlation, if any at all,
with tests of adaptive skills. For example, some years back, my colleagues and I
conducted a study of young people far away in rural Kenya. We discovered that an
important life skill in rural Kenya, knowing how to recognize and treat parasitic
illnesses with natural herbal medicines, actually was negatively correlated with IQ.
The better you did on the practical test, the worse you did on the academic test, and
vice versa.
At the time, a journal reviewer thought that the test was too “far out” -- that knowing
how to treat illnesses was not what intelligence is about. He was wrong. You know
who the really adaptively unintelligent people are today, in the age of COVID-19, not
only in Kenya but also right where you live? Not the ones who get low standardized
test scores. Rather, they are the ones who refuse to wear masks, who don’t socially
distance and who don’t trouble themselves to wash their hands. They are the ones
who, from a Darwinian adaptive standpoint, are unintelligent, regardless of their IQ
or standardized test scores. They have inert intelligence but do not choose actively to
deploy it in the real world. They thereby not only risk their own health and life; they
also put other people’s lives at risk when they breathe on them. They might literally
be the cause of others’ deaths. The principle behind the tests we used in Kenya
applies anywhere: in the end, intelligence is about adaptation to the environment, not
solving trivial or even meaningless problems.
In our current research at Cornell, we are measuring people’s adaptive intelligence
both at a micro level and at a macro level. A micro-level problem might concern an
interpersonal issue, such as how one deals with two friends who are fighting and both
expect you to take their side. A macro-level problem might deal with two nations who
are having a dispute over shared water resources, where one nation is accused of
taking more than its fair share of water. Solutions are free response and are scored
for the extent to which they seek a common good -- balancing the interests of the
various parties over the long as well as the short term -- through the use of positive
ethical values (such as acting toward others as you wish them to act toward you).
Is adaptive intelligence really important? Well, you be the judge. Which skill is more
important for the great majority of students in college once they have graduated: the
ability to solve artificial verbal and math problems or, alternatively, to address and
try to solve problems of global climate change, air and water pollution, global
pandemics, bacterial resistance to antibiotics, gun violence against schoolchildren
(other than the usual pathetic “our thoughts and prayers are with them”), and the
return of would-be autocrats to declining democracies?
Are you going to buy in to the notion that what matters is standardized test scores?
They measure a small part of intelligence, but only a very small part. IQs increased
30 points around the world in the 20th century (the so-called Flynn effect), and given
the current problems in the world, that increase does not appear to have bought us
much.
In my in-press book, Adaptive Intelligence, I argue that all us, including colleges and
universities, ought to focus not on producing test takers who are content to see the
world go to hell in a handbasket so long as they get their degrees and make their
money. Look around us. It’s not working! Instead, we need to develop and assess
students’ adaptive skills in and willingness to make the world a better place. If not
now, when?
Robert J. Sternberg is professor of human development at Cornell University and
honorary professor of psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His
upcoming book, Adaptive Intelligence: Surviving and Thriving in Times of
Uncertainty, will be published in February 2021 by Cambridge University Press.