What procedure did Stern suggest for reporting a person’s intelligence? Why did Binet oppo...

Stern gave the suggestion that a child’s mental age can be found out by his or her performance on the Binet-Simon’s test results. He proposed that the mental age can be divided by the chronological age of the child, which will yield a person’s Intelligence or Intelligence quotient (IQ).

For example, if an eight year old child passes all tests assigned for eight year olds, then the Intelligence Quotient for the child will be as follows:

Similarly, if an eight year old only passes the tests assigned for six year olds, the IQ of the child will be as follows:

Stern’s methods were compiled with Lewis Terman’s modification that the IQ is multiplied with 100 to remove the decimal point. Thus, the formula for calculating the IQ of a person comes out to be as follows:

Alfred Binet opposed this simplified method of calculating one’s Mental Age because he believed intelligence of a person cannot be represented by a single figure or number.

According to Binet, human brain and intelligence was too complex to be figured out such easily. The Binet-Simon’s scale became very popular throughout the world by the 1910’s and 1920’s, in correlating chronological age with intelligence.

Along with the popularity of Binet-Simon’s intelligence measuring methods, Stern’s simplification or the calculations of IQ also became popular.