The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale is a standardized test that assesses intelligence and cognitive abilities. Intelligence is "a concept intended to explain why some people perform better than others on cognitive tasks. Intelligence is defined as "the mental abilities needed to select, adapt to, and shape environments. It involves the abilities to profit from experience, solve problems, reason, and successfully meet challenges and achievement goals.

Intelligence tests began as a psychologist's solution to a problem faced by Paris schools at the beginning of the century. Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, developed a test to measure potential ability at school tasks rather than performance in school, and to produce the same scores regardless of the personalities or prejudices of those who gave or took the test. The scoring method originally used by Binet and his collaborator, Theodore Simon, was based on the concept of mental age or MA (the chronological...