Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

One thing society needs to get right is not screwing over slow thinkers from day 1. A slow thinker can sometimes generate amazing projects over remarkably short timelines, but deliver "meh" performances on standardized tests that use time pressure to fit scores to a bell curve

I think a lot of people just assume that human populations somehow fit a bell curve neatly over various traits, but many of these tests are *designed* to clean up the curve by tweaking test items until beta populations fall along the right line

This might mean adding redundant "easy" questions to push more low-scorers up to the middle or using time pressure to push slower readers/thinkers down to the middle, depending on how the curve looks on initial tests. Or vice versa.

This might be a bit uncharitable. Psychometricians are looking for items with a range of difficulties that can discriminate at different levels of ability. If the distribution ends up being really right-skewed, it means your test can't tell people apart at low ability levels.

Conversely, if the distribution is really left-skewed, then your test is probably too easy, and you're not discriminating at high levels of ability. Time pressure is one way to push that needle, but often they really do just come up with harder questions.

For all the problems with standardized tests, I don't think it's because the people who make them are blindly trying to match their tests to a normal distribution just because it looks pretty. The problem of time pressure in particular is usually just about resources.

They literally *are* doing this, but not because it looks pretty — fitting people to very clean standard deviation slices makes it really easy for the folks who use the scores to e.g. evaluate applicants to narrow their pools quickly