Socioeconomic Status and Intelligence: Why Test Scores Do Not Equal Merit

Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds perform worse on standardized tests than other students. Two experiments investigated whether the testing situation per se contributes to the relationship between social class and intellectual achievement. In study 1, students from low or high social class took a GRE-like test that was described either as diagnostic or not of intellectual ability. When described as a measure of intellectual ability, low socioeconomic status (SES) participants performed worse than high SES participants. However, when the identical test was presented as nondiagnostic of intellectual ability, low SES participants scored as high as their SES peers. Study 2 extended this finding to an IQ-like test, the Advanced Progressive Matrices Test. The implications of these results with regards to the meaning of the relationship between social class and test scores are discussed.