In response to Rex Tillerson allegedly calling him “a moron”, President Donald Trump’s challenge to “compare IQ tests” with the Secretary of State has taken an unexpected turn: a new executive order from the president.
The executive order, which nullifies all IQ scores over 100, followed a spat over the interpretation of Mr. Trump’s own IQ score that began with a tweet by the president reporting the results of their competition:
“Both Rex and me took the IQ test. No surprise. I scored 99! Super smart! Rex scored 130. Sad. What a cheater!”
In the war-of-tweets that followed, an impatient contingent of psychometricians who claimed that raw IQ scores did not correspond to numerically equivalent percentiles were pitted against an outraged Donald Trump who claimed that “psychometricians” were a made-up thing created to discredit smart people like him.
“I have never heard of these psycho people! They all need jobs!!!”, Mr. Trump wrote in one of his burst of tweets against the group of psychologists who claimed to be experts at interpreting standardized test scores. “The only person who ever got 100 on the IQ test was Albert Einstein!”
After the “National Association of Psychometrists” released a statement alleging that Trump’s reported IQ score, in fact, placed him slightly below the 50th percentile, Trump apparently had had enough, tweeting that “This outrage by a group of Hillary Clinton supporters must be met by the power of the pen!”
The resulting executive order, which stated that all IQ scores above 100 would now be considered invalid, included a clause ordering Merriam-Webster and other makers of dictionaries to re-define the word “psychometrician” from its current definition to “a member of a group that participated in a failed smear campaign against the smartest president in the history of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”
In response to the new executive order, psychometrician Richard Johnson from the University of Washington lamented that “Although many fair criticisms of the IQ test have been made, the fact that half of test-takers score above the average is not one of them.”
In contrast, Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, a fierce proponent of so-called “school choice”, welcomed the executive order, stating that “This is wonderful news! It is now up to the parents of America to decide their children’s IQ scores.”