IQ Tests?

[Sweetie]

Which ones are the best, do they actually produce any useful and meaningfull information about your intellect and why such a big gap between results in my case?

[Beth]

I don't know, really, the ones that I and my children have taken were given by psychologists. I am not sure the online ones matter or are accurate.

[Dragar]

I very much doubt online ones are accurate. I also took one given by a psychologist. They measure a number of things, in various areas, from abstract problem solving to verbal reasoning.

[livius drusus]

I've never taken one. What gap are you talking about, Sweetie? Do you mean you took two tests and the results were very different? Which ones did you take?

[Dingfod]

I think most of the online IQ tests just want to sell you something or another so they are quite flattering. I tested at a 161 on one of those that contained problems I had run across in the past, making it more of a memory test. A very good memory can mimick intelligence. I scored 153 on another, genius, which I know I'm not. I ran across one IQ test online somewhere that seemed more like the real thing, with spatial reasoning questions involving three dimensional objects, abstract problem solving and verbal reasoning questions and so on. I scored a 131 on that, not even enough to get into Mensa. That seemed like a reasonable score because couple decades ago, I scored a 135 on the Mensa preliminary test in Omni magazine, supposedly qualifying me to join. Of course, Mensa was just trying to sell memberships, weren't they? They didn't get any of my money. So, who's the smart one now?

When I was a teen, my youngest brother was having problems in school so they took him to a psychologist. This was way before Ritalin would've been prescribed. Our whole family was tested, the results were, well, remarkable. My dad was the lowest in the family at 123, my mother one step up at 124, a 126 for me, 127 for my youngest sister, 128 for my other sister, 135 for the older of my brothers, and the baby of the family, just as we all suspected, a 153, borderline genius. He was just bored to death by school, he was years ahead of his classmates, so he acted up. I was sharp at math, but that kid could do Rainman type math calculations sometimes. He said it was just a trick, but never let me in on the trick, the bastard.

[Sweetie]

Yeah, I've taken a few and there's been way too different results.

I would love to take a more official one as you guys referred to at a psychiatrists office.

[pescifish]

The online ones I've taken tend to range between the high and low of a static 20 point spread.

We had IQ tests every 2 years as I grew up through elementary school. I never knew those figures, but I knew the numbers from the two tests taken in controlled setting by trained education staff during high school. I found out the scores by requesting my file at my college. The file included my high school transcripts, recommendations and test scores.

Those two numbers matched within 2 points and fall about dead center in the online 20 point spread I always hit. There was 2 years between those two tests and my mother confirmed my childhood scores were always in the same range.

That conversation with my mother prompted a funny family discussion that has become one of my sister's life stories. Since I knew my score, my mother felt she should tell my brother and sister theirs (we were all adults at the time -- I'm the youngest). Apparently there was a ~10 point spread between my sister and my brother, then another ~10 point to get to mine. Before telling my sister her score, she lovingly couched it as sensitively as she could: "Your father and I have always tried to give you fair consideration of your 'situation' and didn't expect as much from you because of it."

My sister's IQ easily qualified her for California's State Identified Gifted program! This, in our opinions, says a lot about how warped our mother was. :hysteric:

[copiae]

Which ones are the best, do they actually produce any useful and meaningfull information about your intellect and why such a big gap between results in my case?

I couldn't tell you which ones are the best, but I can tell you that what an IQ test measures: Your ability to do IQ tests.

I'll define intelligence as applied pattern recognition/extrapolation. There are many other definitions available, but I think that this one covers most aspects of what people consider to be intelligence.

IQ tests attempt to gauge ones intelligence by posing a series of questions, of various different types (numerical, semantic, visual-spatial, 'real life problems', etc), and seeing how well you recognise and apply the pattern in each of these cases, with the general theory being that the more you can recognise and apply, the more intelligent you are.

Of course, the methods of implementation can have major flaws. Semantic and 'real life' problems presuppose a certain degree of knowledge, usually of the originating country/culture. For instance, a seemingly harmless question like:


LAS VEGAS is to NEVADA as NEW YORK is to ...*

a) NEW YORK
b) AMERICA
c) WASHINGTON, D.C
d) TEXAS

If I am not American, would my inability to either spot the relationship between Las Vegas and Nevada, or apply that relationship to New York and the supplied answers mean that I am less intelligent than someone who has lived in America all thier lives, and knows the relationship in question?

What about: "BRITNEY SPEARS is to THE SPICE GIRLS, as ...."?

Its easy to see the various other question types that could fall into this area, although it is problematic to gauge how far to go (the good ol' slippery slope): Compare the case of someone conversant in English, and an immigrant with limited grasp of the language. Some IQ tests do try to solve this problem by not having any words in them at all, instead just relying on visual-spatial type questions.

I could argue that these types of IQ tests are equally ineffectual, if someone is spatially weak, or has had little to no exposure to spatially orientated problems before. An individuals abilities vary, both 'innately' and what they have developed/neglected over the years, due to jobs and/or hobbies. This means that they will naturally peform better or worse at different tests, based on the question focus of the test.

Finally, an individual can train themselves at IQ tests, even unconsciously, by doing a couple of them. Once familiarity is acquired with the patterns, an individual may do much better at IQ tests that tend to ask similiar questions, even though he or she may not necessarily be any more intelligent.







* Er, I think this question should make sense. If it doesnt, it would be good if someone could let me know.

[ceptimus]

It used to be the case that while all the different tests were normalised to give a mean score of 100, the spread of the results were NOT normalised. So a clever person might score 150 on the Stanford-Binet scale, but 170 on another.

Most people don't realise that the IQ test represents the tail end of a big Eugenics program that was underway about 100 years ago. It attempted to show that certain races were less intelligent than others. The tests were designed by white well educated Christians, and 'showed' that Africans, Asians, Jews and so on were, on average, less intelligent than the average White Christian. :fuming:

IQ tests measure how good you are at doing IQ tests. There is some correlation with 'smartness', whatever that means, but people tend to put way too much faith in the tests.

[Brimshack]

And the racism continues with standardized testing. I think I've related this incident somewhere online before, but it's a good example of cultural bias. A woman I know teaches at Moencopi, and the overwhelming majority of her students are of course Hopi. One of the items on a national test she had to administer was a question about what an umbrella is used for. The correct answer was rain, but one of the dummy answers was sun. Having just spent the latter part of the summer using umbrellas to protect them from the sun during the dances, lots of her kids ansered with the sun and thus missed the question. Add in a few more questions like that and you have a case for saying Hopi children are behind, and add in the No Child Left Behind crap and you have an excuse to punish the Hop schools for being full of Hopi.

Makes me want to shoot the bastards who still promote this crap.

[John Carter]

Of course, the methods of implementation can have major flaws. Semantic and 'real life' problems presuppose a certain degree of knowledge, usually of the originating country/culture. For instance, a seemingly harmless question like:


LAS VEGAS is to NEVADA as NEW YORK is to ...*

a) NEW YORK
b) AMERICA
c) WASHINGTON, D.C
d) TEXAS

* Er, I think this question should make sense. If it doesnt, it would be good if someone could let me know.

The question as worded is ambiguous. Is the NEW YORK in the question New York city or New York state? Similarly, which New York is being referred to in answer a)? Depending on the answers to those questions, either a) or b) could be correct, or the question could be meaningless (in the sense that there is no good answer provided). That said, this points out yet another problem with such tests. They are often riddled with questions that can have multiple equally valid answers but insist that only one is "correct."

[viscousmemories]

And the racism continues with standardized testing. I think I've related this incident somewhere online before, but it's a good example of cultural bias. A woman I know teaches at Moencopi, and the overwhelming majority of her students are of course Hopi. One of the items on a national test she had to administer was a question about what an umbrella is used for. The correct answer was rain, but one of the dummy answers was sun. Having just spent the latter part of the summer using umbrellas to protect them from the sun during the dances, lots of her kids ansered with the sun and thus missed the question. Add in a few more questions like that and you have a case for saying Hopi children are behind, and add in the No Child Left Behind crap and you have an excuse to punish the Hop schools for being full of Hopi.

Makes me want to shoot the bastards who still promote this crap.
Wow, that sucks. :(

[copiae]

Of course, the methods of implementation can have major flaws. Semantic and 'real life' problems presuppose a certain degree of knowledge, usually of the originating country/culture. For instance, a seemingly harmless question like:


LAS VEGAS is to NEVADA as NEW YORK is to ...*

a) NEW YORK
b) AMERICA
c) WASHINGTON, D.C
d) TEXAS

* Er, I think this question should make sense. If it doesnt, it would be good if someone could let me know.

The question as worded is ambiguous. Is the NEW YORK in the question New York city or New York state? Similarly, which New York is being referred to in answer a)? Depending on the answers to those questions, either a) or b) could be correct, or the question could be meaningless (in the sense that there is no good answer provided).

I meant it as in LAS VEGAS is to NEVADA as NEW YORK (city) is to B) NEW YORK (state). Thanks for pointing out my mistake :).

[The Lone Ranger]

And the racism continues with standardized testing. I think I've related this incident somewhere online before, but it's a good example of cultural bias. A woman I know teaches at Moencopi, and the overwhelming majority of her students are of course Hopi. One of the items on a national test she had to administer was a question about what an umbrella is used for. The correct answer was rain, but one of the dummy answers was sun. Having just spent the latter part of the summer using umbrellas to protect them from the sun during the dances, lots of her kids ansered with the sun and thus missed the question. Add in a few more questions like that and you have a case for saying Hopi children are behind, and add in the No Child Left Behind crap and you have an excuse to punish the Hop schools for being full of Hopi.

Makes me want to shoot the bastards who still promote this crap.


The supreme irony here is that "umbrella" means "sun protector," more or less. Umbra is Latin for "shade," and the suffix -ella means "little," so a rough translation of "umbrella" is "a little shade."

Cheers,

Michael

[Ensign Steve]

What does parasol mean? ;)

[The Lone Ranger]

What does parasol mean? ;)


"Parasol" is of French origin. It derives from the Italian parasole, which literally means "protection from the sun." "Para" means "defense against" (from the verb parere "to ward off") and "sole" means "sun."


According to the etymological dictionary I consulted, anyway.

But I suspect you already knew that.

Cheers,

Michael

[viscousmemories]

I meant it as in LAS VEGAS is to NEVADA as NEW YORK (city) is to B) NEW YORK (state). Thanks for pointing out my mistake :).
I guessed that you meant AS New York City is to New York State. What's my IQ?

[xouper]

Brimshack: And the racism continues with standardized testing. I think I've related this incident somewhere online before, but it's a good example of cultural bias. A woman I know teaches at Moencopi, and the overwhelming majority of her students are of course Hopi. One of the items on a national test she had to administer was a question about what an umbrella is used for. The correct answer was rain, ...
That poorly worded question is not necessarily racist, it was just plain ignorant. Apparently the test author never heard of patio furniture. :)

http://www.patioumbrellas.com/

or has never been to the beach:

http://www.cdislands.com/photos_hawaii/haw2/xha41330.jpg

Image courtesy of http://www.cdislands.com

[seebs]

I think in principle they can be reasonably culturally neutral, but it's hard. I remember on the one I had in 1st grade, there was a baseball question, and I had NO idea what they were talking about.

I do currently believe that "intelligence" is meaningful... But I don't think it's ever going to be quite deterministic enough to be a very useful thing to talk about. For instance, I'm pretty smart, but that doesn't mean I can, oh, say, reliably put shoes on without reminders from someone who has some kind of volitional control over attention.

I think there is a real danger from cultural biases, but there's a greater danger, which is that I don't think our society is yet to a point where we could accept any real differences between groups... Which is odd, because we're perfectly comfortable with nearly any other trait varying from one group to another. Height, incidence of hereditary diseases, athletic ability, are all good things to vary.

[Crumb]

It may very well be the case that there is no single attribute that we can call general intelligence. That IQ tests, if they measure anything, would be taking many different mental skills that each individual has in different degrees and smashing them together into one number that really doesn't tell us much of anything. Maybe it just tells us the "types of intelligences" that this particular test actually measured were mostly your strenths, or mostly your weaknesses.

I am skeptical of any supposed measure of intelligence, because there doesn't seem to be a good way to objectively demonstrate their effectiveness, except by comparing their results to one another, or comparing their results to future success in career or education, which again is not a measure of only intelligence.

[squian]

One of the traditional failures to understand intelligence is the inability to explain the range of possible expression of intelligence. As explained in previous posts the notion of "genalized intelligence" is probably flawed and traditional IQ tests seem to catch only a narrow range of what the brain can be applied to do.

For many years now, forward-thinking educators have been looking at new ways to consider intelligence in children. One such approach is the so-called "seven intelligences". They are:
Physical: sports, car maintenance, do-it-yourself projects, woodworking, crafts, cooking.
Linguistic: verbal arguments, crossword puzzles, riddles, research, poetry, writing, giving instructions.
Mathematical/Logical: budgeting, planning, calculations, estimating quantities, time management, math, sciences.
Visual/Spatial: map reading/navigation, using diagrams/plans, driving, art, dressmaking, model layouts.
Musical: playing music, repeating songs, rhythm, recognizing tunes, moving in time to music, remembering slogans&verses.
Inter-Personal: listening, committee work, supervising others, parenting, teaching, consoling, training others.
Intra-Personal: keeping a diary/journal, time management, planning and organization, understanding your emotions, goal setting.

Although measurement is still very popular (as with the No Child Left Behind), it is probably foolish to think measurement has any value. Personally, I favor an educational approach with a focus on concrete accomplishment, not test results that attempt to measure something as poorly understood as intelligence.

[Dingfod]

Hmmm, I'm at least moderately adept at all but the last two, and on those, I suck.

[inland wave]

you manage at all quite well. Don't sell yourself short.

[xorbie]

The IQ test is, IMO, only moderately better than SAT tests for determining anything like intelligence. Of course, some are better than others but I put little stock in any of them.

There are, as squian stated, several different types of intelligence (not sure about some of those on your list). I think that the best general definition I can give is the ability to connect concepts, form patterns, think abstractly, etc.

I think this works somewhat well for what most would consider "intelligence" without limiting it to how quickly you can do trivial math problems and how many words you can memorize.

[xouper]

xorbie: The IQ test is, IMO, only moderately better than SAT tests for determining anything like intelligence.
To clarify, Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) were not designed to measure intelligence. They were designed to predict how well students will do in college. And part of what they measure is how prepared students are for college level studies.

[xorbie]

xorbie: The IQ test is, IMO, only moderately better than SAT tests for determining anything like intelligence.
To clarify, Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) were not designed to measure intelligence. They were designed to predict how well students will do in college. And part of what they measure is how prepared students are for college level studies.

Right, that's my point. An SAT tests your knowledge of how to solve simple math and vocab based problems. An IQ test tests your knowledge of how to solve simple IQ test questions. It's a different subject matter, but I don't feel either is particularly great. The IQ test is certainly better though, just not by a significant margin (that said, I'm mostly referring to the various online tests out there, I don't remember ever taken one adminstered live by a professional).

[xouper]

xorbie: The IQ test is, IMO, only moderately better than SAT tests for determining anything like intelligence.

xouper: To clarify, Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) were not designed to measure intelligence.

xorbie: Right, that's my point.
OK, we're agreed on that point. If I may ask, what was your point in comparing IQ tests to something that is not intended to measure IQ?

[xorbie]

xorbie: The IQ test is, IMO, only moderately better than SAT tests for determining anything like intelligence.

xouper: To clarify, Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) were not designed to measure intelligence.

xorbie: Right, that's my point.

OK, we're agreed on that point. If I may ask, what was your point in comparing IQ tests to something that is not intended to measure IQ?

IQ tests are designed to measure intelligence. I was pointing out they are not much better at it than something that wasn't designed to measure intelligence.

[xouper]

xorbie: IQ tests are designed to measure intelligence. I was pointing out they are not much better at it than something that wasn't designed to measure intelligence.
Thanks for clarifying. I didn't just want to assume that's what you meant.

May I ask, do you have a cite for the assertion that IQ tests are not much better than SATs for measuring intelligence?

[xorbie]

xorbie: IQ tests are designed to measure intelligence. I was pointing out they are not much better at it than something that wasn't designed to measure intelligence.
Thanks for clarifying. I didn't just want to assume that's what you meant.

May I ask, do you have a cite for the assertion that IQ tests are not much better than SATs for measuring intelligence?

Just my opinion, having taken both and done fairly well (better on the SATs though, I suppose).