Introduction: Ms. T, the School District No. 5, psychologists peddling junk science, and the vexing question of how many IQ points elementary school teachers have to have (if indeed it even matters)

By Dr. Bob Uttl (March 4, 2025)

I met Ms. T in Fall 2015 at a small party. I learned that after many years of teaching in the School District No. 5 Southest Kootenay (SD5), Ms. T’s teaching was suddenly put under miscroscope. To cut a long story short, Ms. T was walked out of the classroom at the end of the day on May 10, 2010, and forced to undergo a series of psychological assessments for reasons unknown. The assessments concluded that Ms. T was a Canadian woman of average intelligence and cognitive abilities. However, two of the assessors, Dr. Mary Westcott and Dr. J. Braxton Suffield opined that Ms. T’s average number of IQ points and average cognitive abilities prevented her from performing her elementary school teacher duties. As a professor of psychology and internationally recognized expert in cognition, memory, aging, psychometrics, and psychological measurement, I was nothing short of flabbergasted. I asked Ms. T to send me the reports and I promised to look them over.

Ms. T sent me the reports, and indeed, the psychologists came to these astonishing conclusions without ever knowing the required number of IQ points for performance of Ms. T’s job (if there ever was one), and without ever conducting any criterion-referenced testing to determine if Ms. T had the required number of IQ points. Dr. Westcott‘s and Dr. Suffield‘s psychological reports were stunningly incompetent for many other reasons. For example, the reports did not cite sources, did not disclose which tests their authors used, did not include confidence intervals for any of the observed scores, did not consider multivariate base rates of low scores, interpreted scores obtained while Ms. T was physically ill and vomiting, did not correctly score tests, did not correctly present the data in figures, etc..

I figured I would assist Ms. T to write a letter to the SD5 pointing out various fatal flaws in Drs. Westcott and Suffield’s psychological reports the SD5 relied on. I assumed the SD5 would engage Ms. T in discussion, I would attend the discussion, I would point out the fatal flaws in the reports, and the SD5 would perhaps hire some other expert to help them understand that they were relying on psychological reports that were full of errors, used outdated and obsolete tests (e.g., GATB), and made claims about Ms. T not having enough IQ points even though no one knew what that minimum number of required IQ points was. Ms. T sent the letter to the SD5 via email on January 18, 2016. In response, the SD5 ignored the letter and instead advised Ms. T, via registered letter, not to communicate with the SD5 directly. Ms. T sent one more letter, but the SD5 played dead and did not respond to Ms. T.

On March 1, 2016, Ms. T filed the complaint of discrimination on the basis of perceived disability with the BC Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT). On May 24, 2016, the SD5 terminated Ms. T’s employment and advised the BC Teacher Regulation Branch that they terminated Ms. T’s employment because they exhausted their duty to accommodate (how the SD5 concluded that they exhausted duty to accommodate without even talking to Ms. T remains a mystery to this day). The SD5 provided the BC Teacher Regulation Branch (“TRB”) with 107 pages of “related” documents, keeping thousands of similarly related documents in their drawers and in secret locations, away from the TRB and from Ms. T. The TRB commenced to investigate the SD5’s allegations that Ms. T did not have a mental capacity to be a teacher. During that time, Ms. T was teaching for another school district on a fixed temporary contract, and subsequently worked as a teacher on call for all other school boards in the area. However, the TRB notified all of her employers (as they usually do) that she was under investigation, and not surprisingly, all of Ms. T’s employers stopped calling her for work. The TRB notices effectively ended whatever was left of Ms. T’s teaching career. Over the years, the TRB kept sending notices to Ms. T that they were investigating and investigating when in fact they were doing nothing at all and waiting for the BCHRT proceedings to finish (the TRB’s repeated lies to Ms. T that they were investigating when they were not were eventually disclosed in a related proceeding under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act). Eventually, after over 2.5 years of the “investigation”, on December 6, 2018, the Commissioner Kushner closed the investigation of Ms. T on the grounds that there was “no reasonable prospect of the [SD5] report or complaint will result in an adverse finding by a panel.” (read the Commissioner’s Kushner’s letter).

Despite the Commisioner Kushner’s conclusion, the SD5 dug in and continued to insist that Ms. T is unable to perform her teaching duties due to her average number of IQ points and has continued to soldier on in the BCHRT proceedings hoping for a different outcome than the outcome of the TRB proceedings. The BCHRT proceedings have now, on March 1, 2025, entered their 10^th year. They are in the hearing stage before the Tribunal member with over 30 days of hearings completed over the last two or so years and 5 to 10 more hearing days to go.

I estimate that the BC taxpayers have likely spent millions of dollars defending the SD5’s indefensible claim – the claim the SD5 adopted from Dr. Westcott’s and Dr. Suffield’s psychological reports — that Ms. T, a Canadian woman of average intelligence (average number of IQ points) and cognitive abilities, is “prevented” from performing her elementary teacher duties by her average number of IQ points and average cognitive abilities. The SD5 has been represented by a long list of lawyers who were receiving their instructions from Mr. Brent Reimer, the Director of Human Resources, the SD5, since at least the time the hearing started. Ms. T has been represented by myself for free (Link to donate funds for transcripts, legal advice & other disbursements) (sadly, Ms. T is not funded by unlimited deep pockets of the BC taxpayers and cannot afford a lawyer, making this an unequal fight).

I have established this website in the public interest to shine a light on:

• the School District No. 5 Southeast Kootenay use of IQ scores to terminate teachers, fabricating allegations against teachers (the allegations that even their own investigator found “no evidence” for and concluded that they “did not happen”), using unsubstantiated and uninvestigated allegations against teachers, providing secretly investigation reports that the SD5 claimed did not exist to a psychologist, etc.
• the vocational and forensic psychologists’
  • use of outdated, obsolete, and irrelevant tests, norms, and data to make disparaging statements about their clients’ IQ and their ability to do their jobs
  • use of outdated and obsolete beliefs about average intelligence of undergraduate university students and university graduates
  • inability to find a correct test manual (see How many psychologists does it take to locate a correct test manual?)
  • failure to read or failure to remember what the test manual states
  • inability to correctly score psychological tests (see Errors, falsehoods, and plagiarism in scoring and interpreting psychological tests: Minimally competent conduct?)
  • inability to accurately present scores, classify test scores, and graph test results (see Are psychologists able to correctly classify test scores? Can they create a reasonably accurate frequency table? Some can, some cannot, and some do not want to.)
  • inability or failure to understand very basic underpinnings of psychological testing such as test reliability, 95% confidence intervals, multivariate base rates of low scores, etc. (see Dr. Mary Westcott’s apophenia…, Multivariate Base Rates…)
  • extensive plagiarism in psychological assessment reports and even in those reports put forward as “expert reports”, that is, the product of the expert’s independent work (see Did Dr. Mary Westcott plagiarize her Expert REport from Dr. Allan Mandel, her boss, and President of Mandel & Associates Ltd.?)
  • and in general, practicing junk science, pseudoscience and quackery rather than practicing science
• the College of Alberta Psychologists’
  • actual “minimum” standards of practice — there are none, as anything goes and not even informed consent is needed (see College of Alberta Psychologists: An informed consent, hallucinations of an informed consent, and/or sweeping things under the rug)
  • failure to enforce the Alberta’s Health Profession Act, the Standards of Practice and the Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists
• the BC Teacher Regulation Branch workings when dealing with the school districts’ reports about teachers
• and much more.

If you wish to read some related peer-reviewed scientific publications, you can follow the links below (freely accessible):

• Peer-Reviewed Journals
  • Uttl, B., Violo, V., & Gibson, L. (2024). Meta-analysis: on average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average. ScienceOpen Research.
  • Uttl, B., Sikma, K., & Tat, M. (2025). General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB): Use of Obsolete Tests, Data, and Beliefs Causes Harm. Psychological Injury and Law.
• Peer-Reviewed Conferences
  • Uttl, B., Sikma, K., & Tat, M. (2024, June). Misinformation and Causes of Harm: Obsolete IQ Test, Obsolete Beliefs, and Failure to Keep Up with Science. Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science, Edmonton, Canada.

Hopefully, the website will be useful to the public, teachers, psychologists, ethics committees, and others, including to those educating current and future psychologists. Psychology needs science practitioners rather than junk science practitioners!

Please donate funds to pay for official transcripts, legal advice, maintenance of this site, and other disbursements!