7. IQ Testing Today in Norway’s Educational Psychological Services

This chapter looks closer at how the most prevalent IQ test in use in Norway today, the WISC-V, is differently understood within Norway’s Educational Psychological Counseling Services (EPS). Based on ethnographically informed observations and interviews it provides glimpses into how practitioners speak and learn to speak of, use, and critically discuss these tests today. Here it is, perhaps surprisingly, not necessarily the full-scale IQ score that is of most interest, but IQ testing remains a central tool of the trade, both a professional marker and a communicative device. Of note, is how in Norway, it is not only psychologists or psychiatrists who conduct IQ tests. Most employees in the EPS come from a background in education or special needs pedagogy. The chapter elucidates how IQ testing is used, legitimised, and problematised within an important contemporary professional test field.