It brought you The Simpsons. It brought you Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now the BBC thinks it has a new prime-time winner - IQ testing with Anne Robinson.

Next Saturday night (May 11) a studio audience, plus anyone at home who wants to join in, will be able to test their IQs. The BBC says that Test The Nation will be the biggest test ever of this nation’s IQ, and answer burning questions such as: are blondes dumb or are taxi-drivers smarter than politicians?

But will the show tell us anything intelligent about intelligence? Of course not, says Julian Elliott, director of research at Sunderland University’s school of education. “It’s a nonsense. Half the questions in these sort of things are general knowledge. They’re just for the kind of anally retentive person who remembers everything.”

Almost a century after the idea of IQ was invented, the qustion of what “intelligence” is and how you measure it is still hotly debated. Back in 1904, self-taught French psychologist Alfred Binet devised tests to help Paris teachers stream pupils. The creator of IQ always said that intelligence was not a fixed thing, and his test should be used alongside others, but the world loved the idea of a single number for intelligence: the Intelligence Quotient.

Increasingly, though, critics said the tests were culturally biased, and poured scorn on the idea that intelligence was a narrow, static thing that could be measured in isolation from a person’s background and wider abilities. Bitter arguments about racial differences, and nature versus nurture, erupted during the second half of the century.

The result was that, for a time, schools cast IQ into the outer darkness of deep political incorrectness. Today, however, it is back in from the cold - but in disguise. “No test of ours is called an IQ test,” says the National Foundation for Educational Research sternly. “Other people may call them that, but we don’t.”

Nevertheless, so-called cognitive assessment tests use the same kinds of verbal and non-verbal reasoning questions as IQ tests. Most secondary schools, now use them, not to pin labels on children, but to sort them into sets and streams, to predict results, and to help judge what value the school has added to a student’s attainment.

“The content isn’t different, but what it is used for is,” says Carol Fitzgibbon, professor of education at Durham University, whose “MidYIS” baseline assessment system for Years 7-9 is used in a third of English secondaries. In addition, around 800,000 pupils each year, mostly Year 7, use tests developed by the NFER.

So how has a measure that was so reviled come back in schools?

Part of the reason that tests were dropped was that critics rightly pointed to factors such as upbringing and poverty in stimmulating intelligence But researchers have broadly come to accept that, though such “nurture” factors are vital, there is a part of intelligence - known as g, or “little g”, which is inherited and measurable. This is thought to make up about 60 per cent of children’s intelligence.

As a result, IQ tests are now considered to offer, as the Office for Standards in Education put it, “a reliable tool for identifying academic ability”. Not surprising, then, to find that an area in which they are heavily used is to screen candidates for independent, grammar and some specialist schools.

Psychologists say such tests are also useful for picking up on a child’s learning style, and pinpointing difficulties. Children with language difficulties, for example, will show a discrepancy between practical and verbal tasks. And parents worried about their child’s progress often find reassurance about their abilites in these scores.

The Dyslexia Institute, which assesses 7,500 children a year. uses a battery of such tests, in order to “pick up discrepancies,” according to Martin Turner, its head of psychology, who says that IQ tests are an essential part of modern testing, and that public thinking on them is lagging far behind the scientific literature.

But though IQ is once more seen as a useful measure, it is increasingly viewed as a narrow one. Pioneering American theorists such as Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg (see box). have emphasised other types of ability such as musical or practical intelligence.

Their influence can be seen in the selection for the gifted and talented strand of the multi-million pound Excellence in Cities programme. Those selected for help on this will be the top 5 per cent of pupils. Two thirds will show academic ability, but the remaining third will have broader “intelligence”, in art, music or sport.

Even that may not be broad enough. Deborah Eyre, head of research at the Centre for Able Children at Oxford Brookes University says people think that “gifted” means precocious, “doing things ahead of others”. But this is irrelevant to gifts vital in adult life. “It’s what you produce, which is more to do with things like your motivation and creative talents. But it can be hard to test for creative or original ideas”.

Even to those involved in assessing children, the notion of IQ scores is flawed, emotive, and limited. They say scores limit people’s expectations of a child, and offer no sense of possibility. “IQ can change,” says Carol Fitzgibbon, “and vary according to the circumstances in which you take the tests. If you re-test people 24 per cent will change by a standard deviation (a significant amount).”

Also, says Julian Elliott, the tests tell you nothing about how to help a child improve. He champions a “dynamic” approach to assessment, pioneered in Russia, where a child is shown, or helped, to do a task, then assessed on how much he or she profits from the guidance offered.

The London borough of Southwark has turned its back on IQ scores in favour of other kinds of testing, including dynamic assessment. Joan Figg, of WS Atkins, which runs the borough’s educational psychology services, says that “even if 60 per cent of intelligence is inherited, that still leaves 40 per cent up for grabs.”

Also in a multicultural borough such as Southwark, some children have an unfair disadvantage. A Somalian child might struggle with the difference between cat and dog but be fine on the difference between goat and donkey. The borough uses dynamic techniques to assess how best to help each child. But its schools still use cognitive tests to help stream pupils, or to measure value-added scores.

Meanwhile, another big puzzle about IQ looms. If, as scientists say, intelligence is mainly due to heredity, why is intelligence as measured by IQ tests inexorably rising across the industrialised world?

Scientists in America have explained this by saying our urbanised, hi-tech world demands more of the skills that IQ tests measure, such as problem-solving and lateral thinking. In essence, they seem to be saying, we are more stimulated. That may also explain why disadvantaged children in United States “enrichment” programmes gain IQ only to lose it again when they go back to the less stimulating environment of ghetto elementary schools.

All of which leaves only one certainty about this simple - or over-simplified - measure of intelligence: we are utterly attached to it. Even if it were killed off tomorrow, someone would re-invent it the next day.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

IT’S FLEXIBILITY...

In The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, Robert Sternberg, of Yale University, believes we must go beyond IQ tests to focus on “successful intelligence: the ability to adapt, shape and select environments so as to accomplish one’s goals.” Successful intelligence requires analytical, creative and practical abilities. His views are widely respected.

IT’S GOT MANY FACETS

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner, of Harvard University, says intelligence “must be genuinely useful”. Useful abilities he says include linguistic, musical, mathematical, spatial, and interpersonal intelligences. He has galvanised debate, but is criticised for offering no way to measure these intelligences.

IT’S IN THE BRAIN

A Lot Of It’s In The Gray Matter, by Robert Plomin, of University of California Los Angeles, proposes, through studies of twins, that some elements of brain structure associated with intellectual performance are hereditary. But he warns that this does not mean you can tell the ability of any individual from hisher brain as many other things, including environment also have a significant effect.

TEST YOUR OWN IQ

Last year 30,000 people tried Mensa’s home test. This “mini-test” will indicate if it is worth you taking it. Famous members include Sir Jimmy Savile, Carol Vorderman, ex-boxer Nicky Piper, TV critic and journalist Gary Bushell, and league footballers Joey Beachamp and Andy Harris and Lisa from The Simpsons.

Q1. What number is missing from this sequence?

4 9 16 25 36 ? 64

Q2. Which four letter word can be attached to the beginning of the following words to form five longer words?

AGE WIDTH IT STAND WAGON

Q3. Rearrange the letters of ‘ANY TIME’ to give a seven letter word.

Q4. Replace the blanks in this sentence with two three letter words. The same three letters must be used for both words. What are they?

The woman decided to BLANK a well-known firm of solicitors to BLANK for compensation.

Q5. What is the value of the top row of the grid?

Q6. If FP = 10 and HX = 16 what does DS = ?

Q7. What number should replace the question mark?

Q8. What letter should appear next in this sequence?

L K J H ?