From a socio-cultural and dialogical point of view, the use of tests to assess cognitive competence may be defined as a situated practice that involves a large and heterogeneous community of institutional representatives including test designers, traders, teachers in universities or elsewhere, and, of course, practitioners who use tests in their professional practice. In this view, a person's performance in a test appears to be the end product of a long contextualisation process, which relies on heterogeneous norms, discourses and practices. Unfortunately, little is known about the actual professional practices at work in the various steps of this contextualisation process.
Assuming that practitioners can never strictly obey the designers' instructions (that is, the designers' prescribed practices) because each work situation is unique and requires a specific adaptation of generic professional practices, we focus upon a well-know intelligence test: the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (French version WISC III-R). We draw on various sets of data (the WISC User's Manual, the trainers' discourse in textbooks, interviews with practitioners and observations of psychologist-child interactions) in order to shed light on the contextualisation process that starts from the designers' instructions (as they are provided in the User's Manual of the WISC) and ends with the practitioners' actual practices in face-to-face interactions with their clients.
Our results, that are illustrated by many examples, show that the practitioners' actual practices do not always follow the designers' prescribed practices, and that, consequently, there is no such thing as a standardised situation. Our conclusion is that what might be considered to be a regrettable deviance is the reality of work defined as a situated activity.