# The Reliability of Intelligence Tests **Status: stub.** Article 3 of six in [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]], published in *The New Republic* on 8 November 1922. The methodological core of the series. [[Walter Lippmann]] attacks the tests on their own technical ground: score instability across administrations, the distorting effect of arbitrary time limits, and — most damagingly — the thinness of the norming sample underlying [[Lewis Terman]]'s 1916 Stanford-Binet revision, which Lippmann noted rested on a small group of California schoolchildren. Underneath the technical objections sits a conceptual one he returns to throughout: intelligence itself had never been defined. What the tests measured was, in his phrase, an unanalyzed mixture of native capacity, acquired habit, and stored-up knowledge — and no operation on the scores could separate the three. *Stub — expand with: the full text argument in sequence, verbatim passages, and the specific psychometric claims rebutted.* See also: [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]], [[Walter Lippmann]], [[Eugenics]].