Has anyone come across a test that doesn’t test the test takers memory? The type of memory that would recall the name of Napoleon’s last battle, for example.
I wonder because I’m very good at problem solving in my daily routine, but don’t remember much of what I did last week. Or yesterday, for that matter.
I grasp complicated concepts pretty easily, but won’t remember the details later.
For example, I understand the idea of infinity (which has been covered very well on these pages), but the details are gone and never to return. Unless I go back and re-read it all.
What was the question? 
Peace,
mangeorge
Actually, the WAIS is quite culturally biased, both in terms of crystalized intelligence (e.g., facts, vocabulary) and styles of reasoning (e.g., style of narrative, bases of comparison).
An IQ test out of any magazine is even less likely than a standardized, administered test to give you meaningful data.
The WAIS is constructed so that an average score is 100. (At the moment, I believe the obtained average is more like 103, which is not a statistically significant difference.) The standard deviation is 15. The WAIS is composed of multiple subtests in order to attempt to capture multiple domains of intelligence. It works best (i.e., correlates best with other measures) for U. S. majority culture folks.
Of course you can lose IQ points (try head trauma, some drugs, starvation, aging, etc.). However, differences between scores can have several other meanings: Non-correlating tests, poorly normed tests, differences of effort, cheating, sampling of different domains, congruence with practiced cultural behaviors, etc.
If a test is timed, then it was normed (its average and SDs determined) under timed conditions.
I’m happy to provide this sort of response, but don’t have time or inclination to debate what IQ scores mean and what their utility is or isn’t.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in the test. At least some of the questions on it tested learnable skills, things that you can be taught how to do and can get better at the more you practice them.
I got a score of 142 in less than half an hour, which I attribute partly to the fact that, as a math teacher, I know my way around numbers, logic, algebra, etc. since I work with them on a regular basis.
My score is within 5 points of what I typically score on these test and my IQ test taken way back when. It would appear to be as accurate as any other psuedo IQ test.
It is heavy on Logic and probably favors the mathmatically inclined.
I still insist an IQ test is not terribly valuable. However this one seems consistant with similar tests I have taken over the years.
Jim
Actually, IQ tests were never designed to measure intelligence. They were designed to point out what students are lagging behind their classmates so that teachers could determine who needed additional help. A student with an IQ of 100 was doing average work for his age; a student with an IQ of 80 was below average (again, for his age and in a classroom environment). It was not intended to be an absolute measure of intelligence, and the name “IQ” is unfortunate.
I answered “filter”, I believe you ‘opted’ correctly.
Many of these questions were a little vague. I am pretty sure I got the Airplane, Boat, Car, Train and Bus one wrong. I finally opted for Train as it required a set of tracks and the others had more flexibility in where to go. My other choice was Airplane, as it was the only one that left the surface. I just could not figure out how they differed leaving only one out.
The mathematical progressions, Image progressions and anagrams were generally pretty straight forward, but I know a lot of people have problems with them. While it was easy enough, I do question why knowing Waterloo was Napoleon’s final battle had anything to do with IQ or logic.
Thankfully none of these test, test writing and spelling skills. My scores would be a lot lower. When I took the SATs they were still overwhelmingly multiple guess.
Jim
I picked “car,” reasoning that all the others were forms of “public” transportation, designed to carry lots of passengers; but I’m not at all sure that’s the answer they were looking for.
Heh. I still have no idea what the correct answer for that one was, but I picked boat as the odd one out. I couldn’t figure out any obvious criteria for excluding just one of those, so ultimately settled on the boat, because if you include landing gear, all the rest have wheels. Probably totally overthinking it, but it seems as good as anything else.
Two of the others were “Iguana” and “Algeria”. I don’t recall if there was another. I (probably) missed about three on this test, two in a row gave me trouble and one of the number sequences I drew a total blank on (It started with 32 36 9 …)
There was at least one where I thought that there could have been a couple of correct answers, depending on your definition, particularly with the one on how to split equitable rental car costs.
I saw that too, but I just spent part of the week debating the private jet use of Al Gore and I am too use to boats not really being a public transport. That is the one question that left me most confused. I probably got it wrong.
I picked train, because it requires a track to go somewhere, whereas the others can all go wherever they wish, within their desired terrain. I don’t think one of those answers is more correct than the other. And not all airplanes have wheels (some can land on water or snow).
Which is precisely why they got dropped from the SAT several years ago.
If I remember right, the rule on that one was “add 4, divide by 4, add 3 divide by 3, add 2, divide by 2…”
It’s probably too late to mention that this thread contains spoilers for those who wish to try the test, isn’t it? 
Absolutely. The answer I settled on was that the girlfriend, who only rides half the way, splits half of the cost (which means she pays 1/4 of the total), but that’s a judgment call, and a strong case could be made for other arrangements as more “equitable.”
My wife was reading over the shoulder for that one, I chose 25% and my wife said it was right, but I mentioned, that if someone went through all the trouble of renting the car, picking me up and dropping me off, I would have offered 50%.
You could also choose elephant, as it is the only vegetarian; the others are carnivores or omnivores.
Or you could choose turtle as the only water-dwelling one; all the others are land animals.
Or you could choose turtle as the only solitary one; the others all live in social groups (herds, packs, colonies).
Or you could choose turtle, as the only edible food animal among these choices. But that shows a Euro-centric ‘cultural bias’; African or Asian cultures might consider more of them as edible food animals.
That’s why questions like this are not very good ones: the ‘correct’ answer is ambiguous, and dependent on what characteristic the test designer chooses as important.
I almost picked steamboat because I was thinking of the old steamboats that no longer exist, so one was historical. Also, one stays on water, while all the others, even the airplane use land.
But in the end, I picked car because of the public-private dichotomy.
Before we get too deep into this type of nitpicking, real IQ tests are normed by all kinds of statistics. The real ones aren’t developed by someone just making up a list of questions on a whim. There is a tremendous amount of statistical theory involved that works quite well across tests of the same type. Psychology Today can’t go through the expense of developing of a real normed test. Real IQ test don’t ask questions that are obviously culturally biased for example and they go through great pains to measure each question as it relates to other questions that are known statically to differentiate test takers.
That is really the key. IQ tests try to differentiate people on a normal curve and test designers don’t care what questions do that. Instead, they develop questions that differentiate people no matter what those questions are through statistical theory. Questions are tested for racial and sexual biases as well. There are statistical ways to test for sexual or racial biases and few people understand that. The problems with this test from Psychology Today don’t apply to the real IQ tests and huge mountains or research go into differentiating people based on research based on a normal curve in traditional IQ tests.
I piece steamboat as it seemed historical and the rest are in use todat.
I “scored” 142. I’m not going to purchase the extra report that, presumably, contains such important information as the raw score, the norming adjustments, if any, etc.
I think the main points about these tests have already been belabored enough. Analogies are stupid: they simply test whether you think with the same reasoning as the norming group. Similarly, the One is Not Like the Others questions are nothing but a test of your ability to think like a specific group of people; that one about boat, plane, train, etc. is the most egregious example. Usually the pattern questions are reasonable to ask, though that one about the ball with the arrow out of its top apparently oscillating back and forth cannot be answered with any one answer that can be considered “correct” because we don’t have enough data to calculate what happens after the ball gets back to vertical (one can presume it might continue back to the right side, but that’s conjecture unsupported by any evidence). And, of course, the questions that test your knowledge of things like country names, specific events in history, etc., are thinly disguised attempts to differentiate your “intelligence” based upon your curiousity about and exposure to various aspects of geography, history, etc.
Which makes the whole thing total bunk, if you ask me.
As noted, Alfred Binet was attempting to find a way to pre-identify whether students would be likely to succeed in school. If he could accurately predict probable success, then poorer students would not be subjected to discrimination and assumed to be slow learners because of their socio-economic status. In addition, students who might need added help in school could be identified early on, before falling behind and failing (which is what the French authorities were concerned about when they approached Binet). By experimenting with certain types of tests, and seeing what of them correlated well with later success in school, Binet could establish probable future educational success. Thus, the so-called intelligence tests have, from the beginning, existed not to say that one person is smarter than another, but to say that one CHILD is more likely to succeed in education than the other, without added help. It is a very unfortunate fact of our society that, when the concept was ported to this country, we decided it should be used to differentiate among people of all ages, as a measure of some sort of over-arching “intelligence” which Binet and his collaborator, Theodore Simon, never intended.
Yes, the question hinges on an interpretation of “equitable.” Tell me THAT wouldn’t cause the occasional row among friends!? :eek: 