IQ tests, originally coined by psychologist William Stern, are widely used as a means to not only assess one’s cognitive ability but sometimes to select students for special education and other privileges. There has been a long attempt for making the perfect standardized intelligent test. The most prominent one was the Binet — Simon test, published in 1905. All these efforts were toward one goal: being able to assess each and every aspect of human cognitive abilities.

An IQ result placed well within the statistic norm is supposed to remain stable and not change as a child grows older. However, in reality, this is hardly possible and there seems to be a changing pattern. As a result, a question is raised about whether different children with a similar IQ score are supposed to end up showing results similar to each other a few years later. The only way to predict the results in the future is to obtain important information relative to the child’s past. For example, if two children-one raised in an educated family, having all the educational necessities and more and one raised in a family of limited means with illiterate parents- show the same results in an IQ test, it would be quite obvious that the child in the poor educational environment has a potential to function better in a richer environment. Also, the first child would have probably performed worse if he/she was raised in a different environment. This shows that even if tests are known as valid assessments of one’s cognitive functioning, there is always a need to consider the context and the environment a child has been raised in, in order to be able to predict the future performance and full capacities of a child. Therefore, no matter how valid and reliable these tests are, they are only one point in a long path a child goes through and evidently, there are a lot of paths that can meet in one point in a certain time.