As I progressed through the public school system, my classmates and I were given standardized tests at various times. Were these I.Q. tests? I’m not aware of ever “officially” taking an I.Q. test.
Is I.Q. testing reserved for potentially gifted students? If so, how is that determined? Do adults take I.Q. tests?
How much weight should be given to the standardized tests I mentioned earlier? I recall rushing through them and not really being too concerned with accuracy.
No, those tests were state issued to see how well education is going in specific grades. In Michigan, they are called MEAP tests. They work OK, except for the fact that they sometimes don’t serve the purpose they are intended for. For example, just because this years scores were slightly lower than last years, does it mean teachers are doing a worse job? No. It could just mean the students are doing poorly.
Besides the fact that these tests are written in a rather prejudice way, favouring the white suburbanite and not playing to the inner-city black child who isn’t familiar with the situations used in the tests. But then again, I might be wrong.
Anywho, IQ tests can be taken by anyone. MENSA, the genius organization, used to offer official ones online, but they quit doing that. Anyone can pay money and take them. They test only your Intelligence for information retention and speed of thought. Some Taxi cab drivers have an IQ over 140 and some Neural Surgeons have IQs under 110. This just shows that it is trying to test your potential intelligence, how quickly and usefully you can learn new stuff.
The highest IQ in the world is held by this Harley biker dude. I think his is around 270(whoa!!!). Oh, mine? It’s anywhere between 140-155, since I’ve tested several times.
Probably not. In Illinois we took the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills to measure school and student progress; just a standardized achievement test, not intended to measure “intelligence”.
No.
I doubt it’s common practice to IQ test in schools. A good IQ test is much more labor intensive to give to a student than a standardized multiple-choice test. I only got IQ tested because my mother taught psych so she had access to them and knew how to give them.
Sure.
As a measure of intelligence? You can give them some weight, I guess, but even genuine IQ tests don’t really measure intelligence, they’re just the best measure we currently have.
I’m not sure about the Iowa test not being used as an IQ test. I was never knowingly given an IQ but late in my high school career I got a peek at my “file” when visiting my guidance counselor and I saw an IQ score. I wasn’t supposed to see this and I never asked how they got it.
The Iowa test was the only standardized test that all students ever got at my school. It certainly wasn’t advertised as an IQ test and the results were always given back to us in a percentile format…as in you are in the 99 percentile on the Math section and the 97 percentile on the English section and so on.
Then again, by that time I had taken the PSAT, SAT & ACT tests as well…maybe they used that? Was this legal? Not that it matters anymore…
fiddlesticks asks a similar question to the ones that got me thinking about all this: Is my IQ score noted somewhere in my academic history? Were my teachers privy to this infomation and did it affect their treatment of me?
It’s not that I feel cheated or anything.
It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when the doctors were making secret notes on Jerry’s and Elaine’s medical files. 
IQ scores are fairly meaningless numbers anyway.
The best predictor of how well you’ll fare in school are your grades from previous schooling-- intermediate school grades will give you an idea of how well you’ll do in high school, and high school grades will give you an idea of how well you’ll do in college. How well you fare in your post-schooling endeavors depends on what skills you learned along the way. A person who earned good grades throughout their schooling probably picked up good time management skills, good writing and communication skills, procrastination-fighting skills, etc.
I used to wonder about this too, not so much whether it affected their treatment of students but whether it was noted somewhere, and if it was, why didn’t they just tell us?
The only reason I can think of for not telling students what they scored on a standardized IQ test would be that for some it might affect their learning behavior. A student who gets a low score might decide that he (or she) is “dumb” and stop putting any effort into learning. Conversely, a student who scored high might figure that there’s no need to study because they’re so smart, and consequently do poorer than they otherwise would have done.
I think that most of the standardized tests that are given in elementary school are used to measure how the students as a whole measure up against others at the same grade level, and how well they’re learning, and stuff like that. But I could be wrong, I’m not an educator.