Completely agree.
I'm torn on the issue of accommodating cultural differences. On one hand, as others have pointed out, those stanford binet-type tests are pretty heavily biased towards those raised in/familiar with a very specific cultural environment, learning methodology.
In my child's listening comprehension test, she missed only two questions. Not because she couldn't hear the words, but because we've raised her vegetarian: so when the tester said turkey, she couldn't find a recognizable turkey among the pictures to circle (that plucked, headless mound on a plate didn't look like the turkeys with feathers flapping around out back to her). She circled an arm instead of ham, most likely because she's never seen a carved ham and there was a hand at the end of that arm. Cultural implications of standardizing those tests against a specific culture.
And several studies have shown that you can really game the system simply by practicing those tests, becoming familiar with the test-taking process regardless of the subject matter being tested. But on the other hand, I don't want my child to test 'genius level -- for a deaf kid' (or 'for a girl', or 'for someone who is Chinese', or for 'someone in her socioeconomic bkgrnd', and so on). I don't want there to be any question, even if not valid, that her accomplishments and skills are not being assessed against a common scale.
And then I think, so what, these tests mean NOTHING in real life. Except that they do mean something: children get placed in the most interesting classes if they test as gifted, they get the benefit of the doubt, they get that significant self-esteem kick in the pants and then produce accordingly, their parents support them even more, academically, if they are labelled as having high potential, and so on. So, I love/hate the idea of IQ testing. But it leaves me uncertain whether to support a test geared towards my child's very specific and unusual situation (unusual compared to the typical child, both deaf and hearing). Should she take an IQ test for immigrant children whose English is a second language? Should she take a test for deaf or for hearing children? Should she take a test specific to those with CIs?
