What's Your IQ

WHAT BINET MISSED

“Social adaptability” rather than school knowledge

Porteus wanted a test of planning, prudence and foresight, the qualities he thought decided whether a person could live independently. A maze needed no words and no schooling, and its errors could be seen on the paper: a line that runs into a dead end shows impulsiveness, not ignorance.

Each maze stood for a year of mental age, from about three to adult. The examiner allowed more than one trial on harder mazes, and a person's score was the highest year passed, adjusted for the trials needed.

1Never enter a blind alleyAny line into a dead end counts as an error and ends the trial.

2Keep the pencil downTracing is continuous from entrance to exit.

3More trials on harder mazesLower years allowed fewer trials; the score dropped for each extra trial needed.

4No time limitSpeed wasn't the point: slowing down to plan was the intended behaviour.

PLAY · NO BLIND ALLEYS

Trace from the entrance to the exit

Click the square next to your line to extend it, or use the arrow keys. Step into any dead-end branch and the trial fails. Plan first, as Porteus asked. You get two trials per maze, and each passed maze unlocks a bigger one.

LEVEL 1 · 5×5 · TRIAL 1 OF 2Find the way from IN to OUT.

YOUR RECORD

No mazes tried yet.

Grid mazes are generated at random, not Porteus's drawn designs, and the levels aren't his age norms. Stepping back is allowed here; on paper the pencil stayed down.

THE QUALITATIVE SCORE · 1942

Not just whether you got out, but how you drew it

Porteus later added a Q-score that counted the style of the tracing. He reported that high Q-scores, meaning careless and impulsive drawing, were more common among delinquent groups. Click a card to see what was penalised.

Categories as summarised in later reviews; weights per error type are not reproduced here.

REVISIONS AND USES

One test, revised for fifty years

Maze scores fell after prefrontal lobotomy in his studies, so the test was used to track planning loss after psychosurgery.Sources [2][4]

STANLEY DAVID PORTEUS · 1883–1972

A schoolteacher who became a racial theorist

1883Born in Box Hill, Victoria, Australia.

1913Head teacher of Melbourne's first special school for children with intellectual disabilities.

1914–15Devises and publishes the maze test.

1919Director of research at the Vineland Training School, New Jersey, succeeding Henry Goddard's era there.

1922–48Professor of clinical psychology and director of the psychological clinic, University of Hawaii.

1926–31Temperament and Race (1926, with Marjorie Babcock); The Psychology of a Primitive People (1931), on Aboriginal Australians.

1972Dies in Honolulu.

THE RECORD THAT FOLLOWED HIMPorteus used the mazes to rank peoples by race. Temperament and Race (1926, with Marjorie Babcock) compared ethnic groups in Hawaii; he tested Aboriginal Australians and southern Africans and published hierarchies that treated test scores as racial traits. Students and faculty at the University of Hawaii protested his legacy, and the building named after him was renamed in the late 1990s. The maze itself is still used as a planning measure, but its history is part of the reason cross-cultural “fair” testing is treated with caution.

REFERENCES

[1]Wikipedia. Stanley Porteus.en.wikipedia.org

[2]Wikipedia. Porteus Maze test.en.wikipedia.org

[3]Porteus, S. D. (1915). Mental tests for the feebleminded: a new series. Journal of Psycho-Asthenics, 19, 200–213.search

[4]Porteus, S. D., & Kepner, R. D. (1944). Mental changes after bilateral prefrontal lobotomy. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 29, 3–115.psycnet.apa.org

[5]Krikorian, R., & Bartok, J. A. (1998). Developmental data for the Porteus Maze Test. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 12(3), 305–310.doi

[6]Porteus, S. D. (1950). The Porteus Maze Test and Intelligence. Pacific Books (Internet Archive search).archive.org

[7]Porteus, S. D., & Babcock, M. E. (1926). Temperament and Race. Badger.archive.org

[8]Australian Dictionary of Biography. Porteus, Stanley David (1883–1972).adb.anu.edu.au

[9]University of Hawaiʻi student and faculty protests over Porteus Hall (news archive search).search

Editorial record: new page in this project, written from general histories of the test and of Porteus. His 1915 paper and test manuals were not read for this version, and the reference links were not checked to load. Dates, the Q-score categories and the renaming year should be checked against the sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

1914 · Another wordless testKnox Cube ImitationEllis Island's tapping test, built in the same years for people Binet couldn't fairly test.1910 · Vineland before PorteusGoddard's Binet-SimonGoddard made the Vineland Training School America's testing centre; Porteus later directed research there.1916 · The scale Porteus supplementedStanford-BinetTerman's revision, the standard verbal test the mazes were meant to sit beside.1939 · Performance tests in a batteryWechsler-BellevueWechsler combined verbal and performance tests, including a mazes subtest in later children's scales.

Part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Porteus's mazes: testing foresight with a pencil.

“Social adaptability” rather than school knowledge

Trace from the entrance to the exit

Not just whether you got out, but how you drew it

One test, revised for fifty years

A schoolteacher who became a racial theorist

Look ahead, then move.