Does University Challenge really test intelligence?
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 Gail Trimble - the 'brainiest woman in Britain' |
Gail Trimble has been called the brainiest woman in Britain after steering Oxford's Corpus Christi college to victory in University Challenge, but does the programme really test intelligence?
How to test intelligence is a longstanding debate in academic circles.
That hasn't stopped Britain's newspapers praising Corpus Christi's Gail Trimble as the "cleverest" and "brainiest" ever to take part in University Challenge. But is having a wide range of general knowledge the same as being a "clever" person?
Adrian Furnham is a professor of psychology at University College London and has studied the relationship between general knowledge and intelligence.
He makes a distinction between what he describes as "fluid" and "crystallised" intelligence.
 | THE ANSWER University Challenge and similar quiz shows test one form of intelligence - crystallised - very thoroughly Their testing of other forms is debatable |
"Fluid intelligence is analysis, maybe doing Sudoku or a Rubik's cube - speed of analysis with problem solving. You don't have to have had an education."
Crystallised intelligence on the other hand is knowledge you have learnt and then access from memory. Knowing all of the counties in the British Isles is a piece of crystallised intelligence.
Prof Furnham thinks University Challenge is skewed towards this type of intelligence.
"They measure, almost entirely, crystallised intelligence. It is a good index but it is only one branch of intelligence," he says.
He admits they have some analytical questions which test fluid intelligence, requiring contestants to solve equations or process information, but suggests they are by no means the majority.
"They try and have a bit of that for the physicists but they don't have many of those items. They're much more likely to ask you what the capital of Upper Volta is."
Countdown is in general a much better test of this type of mental ability, he suggests.
There are scientists who argue that people with high fluid intelligence will more quickly acquire crystallised intelligence.
 Not all contestants are of equal calibre |
Thomas Benson is the question editor for University Challenge and writes a fifth of the questions on the programme.
"Hmmm... this would be a good starter question," he says.
"We don't set out to test intelligence but I think we do test a certain aspect - the part that is reactive rather than creative."
In other words, most questions are of the knowledge recall, crystallised variety, but he does say this series has featured more "two-step" questions, which do need more than this.
He gives the example of one question which required contestants to make new words from British postal codes (CANE from the codes for Carlisle and Newcastle, a recent example). Contestants both needed to know the postal codes, and be able to creatively re-arrange them to form the new word.
He says there would normally be up to six questions like this which need more than recall in the average edition, as well as one question testing mental arithmetic and are very much in the minority.
"They need to have been through the traditional education system, and have had a thorough academic grounding," he says.
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"There's a certain type of person who's just really good at absorbing lots of intricate detail, only here it's in the academic world."
And of course, whatever the type of intelligence involved, the contestants have to be quick, says journalist Mary Ann Sieghart, a competitor on the "professionals" series of the show.
"Often I found I knew the answer to the question but someone else got in a nanosecond earlier. [The viewer] can't tell that has happened.
"There are some extremely intelligent and knowledgeable people who are just a bit slower."
Psychologists and philosophers have many different concepts of intelligence, and not all would recognise the fluid/crystallised distinction.
American psychologist Howard Gardner thinks intelligence has eight aspects: logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, intrapersonal and interpersonal.
For Gardner, even specially designed psychometric tests don't fully test intelligence, so a television quiz, even of University Challenge's gruelling nature, wouldn't come close.
Prof Furnham says that even if the programme is a not good test of all round mental ability, he is convinced that Trimble is the real deal.
"She would do well on any form of intelligence test," he says.
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