Bias in Mental Testing

by Arthur R. Jensen

Book Overview

Illuminating detailed methods for assessing bias in commonly used I.Q., aptitude, and achievement tests, Jensen argues that standardized tests are not biased against Englishspeaking minority groups... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0029164303
• ISBN13: 9780029164303
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 786 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 7.4" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

Must have for psychologists

Jensen's book is the best intoduction to psychometric bias I have found. When the book was written, it was the tops in the field. Now it just needs a few chapters addendum on latent-trait methods to make it complete.

Masterful Refutation of a Comfortable Old Canard

Jensen's "Bias in Mental Testing" has only one object: to examine and evaluate the common charge that the reason certain groups have lower average intelligence test scores is because the tests used to measure that intelligence are "culturally biased." It is not an effort to prove the "superiority" or "inferiority" of any racial group, nor is it in any meaningful sense "hereditarian," and its misuse by racialist groups, harped on by one reviewer who doesn't seem to have read the book himself, is completely irrelevant. In over 700 pages of scholarly and judicious writing, Jensen effectively demolishes the comfortable rationalization that "cultural" or other bias in the tests used offers even a partial explanation for group IQ testing differences---even demonstrating for example that minority test takers still score lower on average on tests that are specifically designed to be biased culturally in favor of minority test takers. No material in this study has been superseded or effectively challenged, and the claim made by another reviewer that it is "of historical interest only" would be ridiculous if it weren't so obviously deceitful. The book is in fact essential reading for those interested in issues of human intelligence and its testing, and should not be used as a polemical football either by "racists" or "anti-racists."

A Great Work

Still a very well respected work among psychologists despite what Mr. isreal (see below) wants you to believe. Don't take my word for it. Search the web for this and all works by A Jensen. Modern research has still yet to refute the well founded and scientifically supported claim that there are real differences in intelligence between races. Egalitarians are driven frantic by this but nothing is more important than truth.

Nick Umbach's review of Bias in Mental Testing

Superb concision and simplicity in expressing such an obfuscated subject matter in our egalitarian day and age. I'm a sixteen year old who's harbored a fascination with human cognition, specifically IQ. Before reading this book I did not have an accurate model of human cognition; I was always theorizing in vain.Reading books by charlatans like Gardner or like Guilford or Sternberg (or whomever who doesn't accnowledge g) just left me hanging as when someone does not see the light they can come up with an infinitude of possible explanations for something. The truth shall set you free.