Please don’t post your IQ.
I’m wondering how many Dopers have actually had an IQ test, and under what circumstances. The DIY web-based tests DO NOT COUNT, nor do the Armed Services Qualifiers &Etc.
I’m wondering about professionally-administered actual IQ tests.
Me? Nope. Not really.
In school. I think about 7th or 8th grade. Why? I have no clue. As far as I can remember, everyone in my grade had the test but I could be wrong.
Every year my synagogue has an auction, and that year a local psychologist was offering a free I.Q. testing session. I guess my mom figured I’d be curious, and she bid on it, and I went.
I don’t think so…I had to take some sort of test in 3rd grade to get into a special class but I do not know if it was an IQ test or not. It was probably more of a general aptitude test.
Honestly, I’d be embarassed to get an IQ test. I practice disability law, and it hasn’t taken long for me to begin thinking of IQ tests as the things you get to document that you’re genuinely too dim to work.
I know it isn’t so, of course - but my first thought on meeting someone who’d had an IQ test as an adult would probably be “What’s wrong with you?”
No, never been tested.
Yes, they did them routinely when I was in grammar school. I also took the Mensa qualifying test.
Yes. I was given a number of IQ tests in junior high and high school. I don’t know why and my parents were not informed until later.
I had to take one in 2nd grade to get into a special school.
When I was in school a friend working on her psychology masters gave me one.
I have taken four real ones starting when I was 7. My uncle is a child psychiatrist and his office partner was a child psychologist qualified to give a real IQ test (the Stanford-Binet IIRC). My family was curious and paid a reduced rate for me to take one. The next year, they started a special program at school that required a certain IQ which they knew I had because it used the same test as the first time so I took it again. I took psychometrics classes in undergraduate and grad school. I had to take them myself two more times and administer them to other people as well.
Real IQ tests are given one-on-one and take hours. They involve things like putting blocks together to match a pattern or answering reasoning problems allowed. If that doesn’t sound familiar to someone, they probably haven’t taken an official IQ test.
I had a full barrage of psychological tests done between 6th and 7th grades, and I imagine an IQ test was probably among them. I don’t specifically remember it, though, nor what the result would have been.
Last year, I was a guinea pig for one of my husband’s grad school colleagues at his request. In order to become qualified to administer the test professionally, he had to practice administering it to 10 people. Because he was a student, the results are technically invalid, but I suppose it’s about as close to an accurate estimate as I’ll ever get.
I thought it was great fun, especially the playing with blocks part.
It also taught me a lot about how arbitrary IQ tests are–in the ‘‘word definitions’’ portion I almost failed to correctly define ‘‘apple.’’ A lot of the questions asked were highly Eurocentric. But based on the results I would agree that it does do what it’s meant to do – predict how well you’ll do academically.
I’m curious, did you score higher the second time than the first time? I was told that any IQ test I take within 5 years after my last one is invalid, because not knowing the structure of the test is part of the test.
ETA–I didn’t take the Weschler.
Yes, I have. I was tested in elementary and middle schools to see if I qualified for special class placement.
Damn edit window! I mean I DID take the Wechsler, which is not the Stanford-Binet. The validity rules are perhaps a bit different.
This is called the “test-retest reliability.” On the SAT/TOEFL/GRE, it is said to account for about a 30 point swing in scores.
I’ve never taken one outside of web-based.
Could you give some examples? Having never taken the test, I am curious.
I’d like to be tested, personally. I do wonder what it would say about me. I am extremely imbalanced in my abilities - I am very good at language-related subjects and very, very poor at math and whole collection of skill sets that feel related to math in my mind (I have a terrible sense of direction, I can’t play strategy games, I can’t remember the rules to games, I have a difficult time reading diagrams, music theory makes no sense to me, logic puzzles are incomprehensible to me, etc.), to the extent that I’m actually getting screened for learning disabilities next week. Let’s just say that after spending a solid month studying math for the GRE, with maybe a couple hours put into looking over vocabulary words, I scored in 98th percentile on the verbal section and the 49th percentile on the math - and I was absolutely delighted with my math score, and it was really all I cared about.
Sometimes I think I’m some kind of idiot savant and I wonder what an IQ test would tell me.
I took the supervised mensa test last year - there were two, they were called something like Cattrell Culture-Fair test 1 and 2.
The first one was almost entirely English language based - I remember thinking that you needed really strong English to do well in it, so was unsure as to the ‘culture fair’ name. I guess fair as long as your culture speaks English - I’d be surprised if a non-native speaker could tackle it.
I don’t remember doing it, but apparently I took one to get into advanced classes in high school. I don’t know my score.