IQ Testing in South Africa: An Outdated Foundation in Need of Urgent Reform

Over the past year of practising as a psychometrist, I’ve been confronted with a reality we don’t talk about enough: our primary tool for intellectual assessment, the SSAIS-R, is severely outdated.

The SSAIS-R was last normed in 1992—on English and Afrikaans-speaking white, coloured, and Indian learners. Ironically, the majority of learners we assess today are African children attending English-medium schools, with English often being their second language. Yet we continue using an assessment tool normed for a demographic it was not designed for.

This is not a small issue. IQ tests are used to make vital, life-changing decisions:

🔺 Disability grants

🔺 Special school placements

🔺 Exam accommodations

🔺 Decisions about a child’s future learning pathway

And while excellent tools like the WISC-V exist, they have not been locally normed for South Africa, which means reliability issues persist—especially for learners from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Why is the field under-researched?

One reason may be structural: psychometry has often been treated as a stepping stone into becoming a psychologist, rather than a distinct professional field worth investing in long-term. This lack of investment and research has left psychometric testing stagnant in South Africa, while in many Western countries, continuous updates and refinements are standard practice.

Where do we go from here?

If we want to improve education, diagnostics, and equitable access to support services, we need to:

🔺 Push for government-funded norming projects

🔺 Encourage more research focus on psychometry

🔺 Treat psychometry as a specialised field of its own, worthy of ongoing development

🔺 Ensure culturally and linguistically fair tools for the South African context

I’ve personally become heavily invested in this issue—so much so that it’s the focus of my master’s thesis research. 

The more I work in the field, the clearer it becomes: psychometry is one of the most critical aspects of the psychology profession, yet one of the most underdeveloped in South Africa.