Very good points. But I would argue Flynn and #2 is probably a major contributor. Yes, those pattern puzzles are something you can study, learn how they are constructed, and so do better on them. But additional test questions may revolve around math and vocabulary, and how deep your experience with those are. “Hand is to glove as…” is an easy one (except maybe for tropical people) but in general, can you study for, say a SAT vocabulary test in the past two months before taking it, or do you more likely need to be exposed to a flood of interesting vocabulary for several years beforehand to be proficient? Ditto for math - not just equations, but word problems ( If 10 people can do a piece of work in 5 days, working 2 hours a day, how long will 2 people take to do the same work, working 5 hours a day? ) Once again, having to solve math problems all our lives contributes to this experience - Do I have enough money for A,B, and C? Did I get the correct change? Do I have enough gas to get to Hooterville? Is my paycheque correct for the number of hours I worked this week? How much time before I have to leave for home, given I need to be home by 10? This is more complex dealing with numbers in the tens and hundreds than math with a few pennies an item back in 1920; plus we do this sort of math a lot more often. Even for the hard of thinking, modern life is more enriching and demanding.
Agree completely with your overall post and especially the pithy summary I quoted.
My POV in a nutshell:
- Enrichment is most of the difference between a 1920s IQ score and a 2020 IQ score.
- Practice is most of the difference between your IQ score today and some other equally innately smart and culturally similar person taking the same test today.
- The OP can’t take himself back to 1920 as a way of appearing smarter. But he can practice so as to appear smarter.
- And more negatively, if he fails to practice while enough other people are, he’s choosing to appear dumber. Which doesn’t sound like his goal.
- Lots of other people are practicing when it matters; e.g. SATs.
It’s perhaps worth reminding everyone again that most of the things that people think are IQ tests, or which purport to be IQ tests, aren’t actually. Real IQ tests are so complicated that they need to be administered one-on-one by a trained psychometrician, and contain a very wide variety of questions. For instance, one of the questions will be “Draw a picture of a person”. That’s the entire question, but the scoring will depend on what sorts of details the testee includes, and why.
One thing that hasn’t been said yet is that it’s a waste of time to think about I.Q. as an adult. Nobody is going to ask you about your I.Q. when you apply to college. They care about your high school grades, your SAT and ACT scores, your teacher recommendations, your extracurricular activities, etc. They don’t care about what you scored on an I.Q. test years ago. It is a good idea to get a book on SAT and ACT tests and understand how they work, but they aren’t I.Q. tests. They test how well you understand the material you’ve studied up to then, and that’s both a matter of your intelligence and how hard you studied. Similarly, nobody is going to ask you about your I.Q. when you apply to graduate or professional school. They care about your GRE scores, etc. They care about your grades and if you have any published research. They care about your recommendations from professors. I.Q. scores are irrelevant.
When you apply for a job, they aren’t going to ask you about your I.Q. They care about your grades in your most recent educational institution. They want to know about recommendations from your most recent teachers and about research or whatever you’ve done recently. They want to know how well you present yourself in an interview. They don’t care about I.Q. scores.
As a child you might get placed in a higher-level class according to your I.Q. scores. It’s probably a good thing to encourage children to work at puzzle sorts of things, since it might increase their scores on an I.Q. test. It’s important to keep them in good health with things like good nutrition, but they it’s good for everyone to stay in good health with things like good nutrition.
Taking an I.Q. test as an adult (regardless if it’s a professionally administered one or one of those cruddy ones you find online) is more a matter of propping up one’s ego than anything else. Suppose you’re actually a genius and have a job that requires no great use of your intelligence. How does an I.Q. test help you? Get your GED. Go to college part-time and then graduate or professional school part-time. Get a better job. Do you really think that going around boosting about how you are much smarter than other people with your kind of job gets you anywhere?
This is all true, but to save the honour of IQ testing, the standardised admissions tests you mention show a high correlation with IQ - so much that Mensa accepts many of them for admission (although there is a tendency that this is limited to older editions of many standardised tests; see the overview here). So while it is certainly true that an IQ test isn’t a substitute for the SAT or the GRE, it does seem that the two are testing for very similar things.
If you want to see a demonstration of the Flynn Effect, try watching really old Marx Bros or 3 Stooges movies; or similar (WC Fields, Charlie Chaplin). The lead-in to the humor is often painfully slow, the jokes telegraphed and obvious, for a less “with-it” audience. Today’s audience is so much more “sophisticated”.
I would also say that, yes, you can practice taking the SAT and similar - but the problem is, a few weeks or months’ prep won’t overcome a decade of failing to expand your horizons. Better vocabulary? You don’t get that watching “Big Brother House” and “What Not To Wear” all day. Similarly you won’t revive dead math skills in a month. A well-read person and one who paid attention during school will come out ahead, and that’s what the tests measure.
IQ tests present you with problems to solve. The problems presented will require a knowledge base to just comprehend the problem and it’s possible solution. If you don’t know the language that the test is presented in then you will fail completely. Zero IQ. If you have not had adequate education or experience in some areas, than you will score zero in them. Language skills can interfere with understanding the exact intent of the question.
I feel that IQ tests often do not accurately assess intelligence as much as current knowledge and experience. I score satisfyingly high on IQ tests. But when I have the opportunity to peruse the basis of the questions, I often see where I have misunderstood the intent and even the concept of the question. I think a lot of folks fall into this failure zone. IQ assumes to be a concept of how capable you are of being able to learn. But IQ tests often seem to be a measure of what you have learned. It is a difficult thing to parse out. I am interested in how people devise tests to estimate the intelligence of animals. There are no words or questions. The tests are completely reward based, with only objects and actions used to solve. Not at all like reading questions and checking boxes.
For example, when discussing racial bias of questions many decades ago, I remember someone saying - here’s a question about a fence surrounding a house (or maybe a hedge) X feet on a side, and there are opening for 2 gates width Y… For someone whose world experience did not include suburban picket fences this was a more difficult problem. Similarly for gender biases, when a reading comprehension passage was describing military ranks and then asked questions - and boys were more likely to have picked up background knowledge through world experience, reading, TV or movies. (Apparently, IQ tests written primarily by men did not include questions regarding cooking recipes and ingredient measurement…)
So to the actual question.
Yes you can increase your IQ test score. The questions are in several categories and methods to solve. I particularly hate the next in the series questions. But there are folks who have posted the concepts of these questions and how to best solve them. You can actually tune up to get a better IQ score. But as I noted in my previous post. It isn’t your intelligence and ability to learn. But what you have learned. You can learn to get a good score on an IQ test. But is that a higher innate IQ? If it gets a better salary and position. Well aren’t you smart.
None of the comprehensive intelligence tests I am familiar with has any such item on it.
There is an old children’s projective assessment called the “Draw a Person” test. It was developed and theorized about in the middle of the last century and is only rarely used today. It made claims about a child’s level of mental maturity depending upon how many “developmental items” were included in the drawing, but the tests were never really standardized in the way they are now. The findings purporting to say things about a child’s intellectual and emotional development were mainly theoretical, as was much of psychology back in those days.