"What Should We Ask about Intelligence?" by Robert J. Sternberg, in The American Scholar (Spring 1996), Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.

Almost everyone knows of a bright, even brilliant person who succeeds in school but flunks in life. Is such an individual really intelligent? Yes and no, says Sternberg, a professor of psychology and education at Yale University.

Traditionalists in the controversial field of intelligence take much too narrow a view of what intelligence is, he contends. (See "The IQ Controversy," WQ, Spring ’96, pp. 133–35.) He and other "revolutionaries," notably Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner, have been trying to expand the conventional horizons. Every major college textbook in introductory psychology "now prominently features two of the revolutionary theories," Sternberg’s and Gardner’s.

In Sternberg’s view, intelligence has three major aspects: analytical, creative, and practical. IQ tests and the like tend to weigh analytical skills most, he writes, and these are likewise emphasized in most school curricula (which is why such tests can predict school achievement fairly well). In fact, Sternberg says, schools sometimes even penalize the exercise of creative and practical skills, "as when students who depart from a teacher’s expectations or point of view find themselves graded down for having done so."

Gardner favors a different typology, with seven "relatively independent intelligences": linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and "intrapersonal" (self-knowledge).

If human intelligence is as broad as he and Gardner believe, Sternberg argues, colleges and universities are misguided when they reject students because of low scores on SATs and other standardized tests. Such tests may indeed indicate likely class grades. But—as everybody with common sense knows— grades aren’t everything.