What does this IQ score mean (if anything)?

Factual Questions
1

I wonder if any psychologists (amateur or otherwise) can give me an idea of what the test I just took means.

I scored 127 on this “classical” IQ test offered by Psychology Today.

Now, I have seen some come-ons and idiot traps that ask you a few questions, tell the guy he is a genius, and then try to scam him.

My test results tell me 127 is well above most of the population. For a second I thought this might be a scam, but they don’t have my name and address and they have not asked me for anything.

Is this “classic” IQ test genuine? I did it in less than an hour.

What does it really measure? A couple of the questions asked the name of Napoleon’s last battle and who Copernicus was, which struck me as Eurocentric (but I knew the answers of course).

How good is 127? Or are they just flattering me? What is average?

There are some questions that might have more than one answer, as far as I can see. For example, which is least like the other four? Cat – lion – dog — turtle – elephant.

I chose turtle because it is a reptile and the others are mammals. But could it not be elephant because all the others are much smaller, say?

Am I smart or is this test just flattering me? And is it worth anything?

And if I AM smart, am I wasting my time being retired and doing nothing all day but going on SDMB???

By the way, one of my ancestors was black. Considering the stupid, racist stuff I have read on another thread about race and IQ, did my black ancestor forget to give me her stupid gene?

2
3

I got 128 (for what it’s worth). My primitive barbarian Scots ancestors must have forgotten to pass on their whiskey addled genetics.

Your IQ can change daily, depending on lots of different factors. I’ve qualified for Mensa (but am not a member) if that’s any indication for you as to how good your score is.

4

Sorry about quoting myself. That was an edit window error. I agree that true IQ tests should not have questions that are culturally biased at all. The traditional IQ tests don’t have that type although many people mistakenly believe that they do.

I am probably unusual in that I have taken 4 real, honest-to-God IQ tests in my life starting at 4th grade and going up to age 21. It isn’t that I am a super-genius. I just had to take them ranging from special elementary school programs to taking them myself in my psycho-metrics classes. None of them differed more than a percentage point at any time that I took them. For that matter, non of the “fake” IQ tests differed much at all nor did the ACT, SAT, or GRE (taken that one twice with the same result). I wouldn’t just call a pop psyche test score garbage in a knee-jerk way because, in my experience, they give the same rough results that the rest of them do.

That is the controversial part of IQ testing. The strict definition only includes personally administered, traditional IQ tests. In reality, there are a large number of tests using different methods that can find a percentile range that a given person will fall into on all of the other tests.

I don’t think it is in good form however to brag about your IQ score until you sit down with a psychologist for a good chunk of the day and sweat over all the aspects of a real one. I wouldn’t brag about it anyway but that is neither here nor there.

5

I recently tried for Mensa, and got results back saying I had a 112 IQ. I tested years ago, on a different test and got a 141.

I took issue with the fact that Mensa’s test was timed.

Mensa’s test also had Vocab questions.

What gives?

What defines what an IQ test is, or is not?

You can’t “lose” IQ points, can you?

6

Thanks for all your trouble.

So If I understand you correctly, you are saying it is not a REAL IQ test in the real meaning of the term, but if I got 127 on this imitation of an IQ test it probably indicates I would not do badly on a real test, but I probably would not score genius?

May I ask one more question? I was awfully bad at unscrambling letters in a jumbled word to decide if it was the name of a city, an animal, a plant, etc. About 5 of the 60 questions are jumbled words of that kind. I only got one, “Berlin”.

On the other hand, the questions about completing sequences of numbers are very, very easy for me. The patterns just sem to jump out at me. The second is double the first, then you subtract half the first from the second, etc.

But believe it or not, the one that gave me the most trouble was 2. . . 4 . . . .8. . . 16. . . . 32. I stared and stared at it for the logest time and then finally started laughing at how obvious it was.

I wonder what differences like that indicate?

7

It does sem to me that the questions about Copernicus and Napoleon for an Asiatic would be not unlike asking me who General Tsao was. I would likely say that he invented a great chicken dish. :smiley:

8

A number of the questions are ambiguous, some rely on knowledge of trivia with little connection to intelligence, and I’ve seen several of them on earlier tests, so I wouldn’t take this as serious evidence of how smart I really am, especially since I already know it’s a lot.

9

When I did them, there were two tests; a language one (vocab, definitions, that kind of thing) and a mathy one (numbers and visuo-spatial type things). Both were timed.

Vocab ones seem unfair to me; they test understanding, certainly, which I would say is a component of intelligence. But you’d need to know the words themselves before you get to the understanding part.

10

This one question in the test I took really had me baffled:

Light is to window as air is to:
Wind - Suffocation - Breath - Filter - Atmosphere
I finally opted for “filter” assuming that the concept they were looking for was that windows convey light into a room and a filter conveys air.

But frankly,

wind is a supplier of air (nice breeze airs out the house) just as a window is a supplier of light.

Breath conveys air and a window conveys light

I am told hat the Japanese mind, for example, might see apple, banana and bell as belonging together and exclude “breadstick” because the first three have “curvature” and the breadstick is straight. I wonder. . . . . . . .

11

I think the idea is that light has to pass through a window, being modified in the process, and same for air through a filter. But I agree, it’s always possible to reanalyze an analogy question to support any of the other answers, in ways of varying contrivance.

12

I got 105, which doesn’t seem good, but I’m only 13. I might take it over again when I’m older.

13

Belief in IQ tests is generally indicative of low intelligence.

14

117 and I got bored and skipped 3-4 questions.
I don’t think IQ tests have much relevance once you’re past your early 20’s.

15

I didn’t like this test. I got a 133 and I think that’s inflated just to get me to buy the full report. I don’t know if it was internally timed, I hope not since I’ve been taking it while working a little bit a time. Some questions were entirely out of left field . A lot of it is culture specific. I was planning to get an actual IQ test for a while now, so if I do I can check back and see how it correlates, at least for me.

16

Meh. I took it, and even sick and on vicodin-based cough syrup I expected to do better than 134.

I was particularly proud of how I solved the code-breaking question, though. I looked at the answers and immediately saw the last letters of the names were unique, so I only bothered to decode the last letter.

I don’t have a problem with culturally biased IQ tests, by the way, because intelligence is culturally biased. I wasn’t nearly as smart in Cairo as I am in Charlotte, I can tell you that.

17

Why, how low was your score? I am just kidding you, no need to get angry. :wink:

18

Everything - everything whatsoever - about I.Q. is controversial. It’s debatable how much of what we usually measure as I.Q. is genetic and how much is environmental. It’s debatable whether there is really a single thing called intelligence or whether it’s merely the average of a bunch of separate abilities. It’s debatable whether intelligence exists in any meaningful sense at all.

As Shagnasty said, an I.Q. of 127, if it were validly measured, would mean that you would be smarter than about 96% of everyone measured by that test and not as smart as 4% of them. By definition, the average score on an I.Q. test is 100 and the standard deviation is 15 points. Look up standard deviation if you don’t know what it means. It tells you how far out you are on the distribution of a normal curve.

There is no objective thing that is used to standardize the results of an I.Q. test. I.Q. is not something like length or mass that you can take your yardstick or scale to a standard meter (or foot or yard or whatever) or to a standard kilogram (or pound or whatever) and compare it to in order to make sure that it matches the offical definition of that length or mass. When someone makes up a new I.Q. test, they write a bunch of questions that they think are related to intelligence. They then give the test to a large group of people. By definition, the average score of this group is 100 I.Q. By definition, the standard deviation of the scores is 15 points.

And, as already been pointed out, online I.Q. tests tend to be worthless.

19

I scored the same stone cold sober and healthy.

<Chiun> You are… trying to say something? </Chiun>*

:smiley:

*Yes, a gratuitious Remo Williams reference. Sue me.

20

That IQ test does not really shoot down the whole “cultural bias” argument.