Is standardized testing a fair way to measure intelligence?

A case for

While standardized tests are reasonable to measure cognitive abilities, they do a poor job at measuring overall intelligence and human potential. For starters, SAT's largely ignores many abilities that people commonly associate with intelligence, such as creativity, originality, leadership, curiosity, and social skills. Someone can be exceptionally innovative or insightful and still earn only an average SAT score. So it's safe to say a multiple choice quiz can never show those abilities on paper. On a side note, the SAT's aren't even perfectly fair, either, because factors like quality of education, access to SAT prep, and familiarity with these kinds of tests, can really affect the outcome of two similar students. Two people with similar reasoning ability can receive noticeably different scores because of these influences. So it's safe to say SAT's aren't a fair way to measure intelligence, not because cognitive skills are also important, but because it's too narrow to capture everything that intelligence encompasses.

The first objection

You're conflating two separate problems and pretending they're the same thing. Yes, the SAT ignores creativity and leadership, but that's not unfairness, that's *design*. It measures what it claims to measure: reasoning and verbal ability. The real problem you buried is access inequality, which is completely fixable through test design or policy, not an indictment of standardized testing itself. You haven't shown why a narrow, fair measure is worse than a broad, biased one. Which would you actually prefer to defend your own abilities with?