Intelligence testing, according to www.audiblox2000.com, originated around 1904 in France when the French government wanted to know if there was a way to test for the difference between normal children and inferior children. The idea was to place inferior children in special schools where they could receive special attention. Enter psychologist Alfred Binet who developed the Binet scale, also known as the Simon-Binet scale that offered a radical new approach to assessing mental ability. It was specifically designed to weed out those needing special attention and wasn’t designed to rank children in any way. Binet also noted that the scale did not permit the measurement of intelligence. He feared that IQ measurement would forever condemn a child to a permanent condition of “stupidity”, thereby negatively affecting his or her future. Binet’s scale also had a profound effect on the education and intelligence testing of children in the US. Those who gave intelligence tests based on this scale, however, didn’t yield to Binet’s caveats and often misused the test, using it to rank children’s intelligence. H. H. Goddard, director of research at Vineland Training School in New Jersey, advocated a more general use for the intelligence scale and believed that intelligence was a solid, fixed entity that could easily be measured. In 1916, Lewis M. Terman, who also believed that intelligence was fixed and of hereditary origin, published the revised Stanford-Binet Intelligence test we’ve come to know today as the most popular intelligence test used in the US. Through Goddard’s and Terman’s work, the idea that intelligence tests are accurate, scientific, and valuable tools for bringing efficiency to the schools and has resulted in assigning the IQ score an almost exalted position as a definitive quality of an individual.