General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB): Use of Obsolete Tests, Data, and Beliefs Causes Harm

Abstract Psychologists use obsolete intelligence tests and data to make false research and clinical claims such as (a) undergraduate students’ IQ is between 115 and 130 points, (b) correlations between IQ and years of education are well above 0.50, and (c) 16% of workers in any occupation are prevented from performing their job due to their low IQ. In this study, we examine one of the obsolete tests, General Aptitude Test Battery Canadian Edition (GATB CDN), derived from the United States Employment Service GATB but normed on the Canadian General Working Population (GWP) sample. We briefly review the history of the GATB and report on a new study in which we examined how university students today perform on the GATB CDN, some 40 years after it was normed. Our results show that undergraduate university students today scored on average about 1 SD (15 IQ points equivalent) below the 1985 GATB CDN GWP norms. In contrast, these same students scored on average 103 IQ points on Shipley-2, which was normed in 2008 on a US population sample. Our results demonstrate that the GATB CDN norms have become outdated and obsolete. In turn, opinions issued by vocational counselors, vocational psychologists, neuropsychologists, and forensic psychologists based on the GATB CDN obsolete norms are invalid, misinformation, unscientific, and pseudoscience. We conclude that using outdated and obsolete IQ data to make disparaging statements about examinees’ IQ and ability to do specific jobs is harmful, incompetent conduct, and malpractice.