I don’t normally flaunt my I.Q. score.
I have joined Mensa and have found it a good way to meet people and chat.
I don’t normally flaunt my I.Q. score.
I have joined Mensa and have found it a good way to meet people and chat.
Yeah, I was in Mensa some years ago when I was looking for ways to meet people, joining clubs and such. (IQ tests ranging from 120’s to 180’s. Sheesh! so much for accuracy!) The premise seems to be that it’s easier to connect with people of similar intelligence. That wasn’t my experience with the local chapters I visited though, so I stopped going. I’ve had a much easier time finding friends through other clubs I’ve joined, like Scrabble or stunt-kiting, than through Mensa. Heck, I even got better results goin’ to a Dopefest!!!
Not to disparage anybody here, but the way people report I.Qs is complete crap. In my experience, the breakdown of I.Q. for the U.S. (including asking some of the stupidest people I know) is
95-100 7%
100-110 15%
110-120 25%
120-130 25%
130-145 10%
145-160 8%
160+ 10%
Either Psychologist’s are constantly lying to protect peoples feelings, People themselves are lying, or through some statistical mistake the average is 130ish.
Not to mention that everybody’s tested I.Q tends to be just a little bit higher than the last person in the room to answer. Sorry, but it just annoys the hell out of me, some of the crap we try to pass as scientific.
vertiginous wrote:
Well, it’s important to me. After all, your IQ score is a rating of how good you are as a person, right?
wolfman, haven’t the results of IQ tests, originally normalized to 100 as 50% of the poulation, been reporting increasing high scores since they were first tracked? This is a phenomenon that has been accurately measured (although to my knowledge not yet explained) for the last 50 years or so. I don’t see that it’s out of the question that the mean might be higher than 100 (say 130 like you suggested) at this point.
Ren
it’s called the Flynn effect. I think IQ’s have been raised by about 10 points and it is why IQ tests are redeveloped.
It’s usual to consider the highest score scored in a lifetime as the most accurate. Ahem, tests on the web don’t count ;). That is if the test is considered to be consistently able to test to the high level. I don’t know of any that are notorious for overstating IQ although many tests do understate IQ. The ceiling effects kick in and the test might not be valid.
This site explains the Flynn effect
http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/97articles/neisser.html
I think in that article it explains how the Flynn effect is not valid at the extremes of IQ measurement but I haven’t got time to look properly
God I am tired! IQ tests were of course renormed even before Jim Flynn developed his theory of rising IQ numbers. Old IQ tests ask questions which are not relevant and give false results.
Sorry for the mind fart - my kid got diagnosed with dyslexia this afternoon. It wasn’t a surprise but it’s still shattering
From what Mofo said, I’m about that smart. I’m capable of SO much more, however.
Wolfman
I am gonna agree with you that there does seem to be an over representation of 160+ IQ, esp when self reported ;).
However interesting your personal experience might be, it’s not valid. IQ’s are scored over a bell curve and to score as gifted a person needs to be over the 130 mark. Over 130 however is only 2% of the general population. 130 works out to be about 1 in a hundred people. 150 is about one in a thousand people. 160 is one in 10 000. 180 and above is either one in a million or one in 3 million depending on who you believe. Silverman of the GDC in Denver has found far more kids scoring over 180 than the bell curve would predict but they are still rare. There’s an unexpected blip at the other extreme of the bell curve as well.
IQ? I always thought it was the car you drove. Dang!
Primaflora, so the implication is that it is highly unlikely that all the high numbers reported in this thread are accurate? That leads me to another question for you. Myself and many others here report having had widely varying results on IQ tests. How do you explain a range like mine (from the 120s to the 180s over about 5 different tests within a 2 year period)? How would one determine, in such a situation, what a reasonably accurate number was? And has it been your experience (or wolfman or anyone elses) that this sort of range is common/uncommon?
::looks around nervously:: Ren, I am not commenting directly on anyone’s IQ test results in this thread. The only absolute statement I will make is that anyone who believes a result gained from a test on the web really has a room temperature IQ ;). And high IQ tests results gained in group testing don’t usually repeat with individual testing.
Oookay… test results. We don’t have a good IQ test for the extremes of IQ. The Stanford Binet LM is the only test which tests over and above 160. It is a test which uses outdated norms and is hotly disputed as to whether it is still valid or not. The GDC in Denver use it as they say it is still the best test currently available. It is strongly disposed to favouring kids with high verbal intelligence. Sometimes the Weschler tests will be interpreted in a way that indicates the IQ is up to 160 but Weschler himself says that the tests are only normed to 130 and if a child scores over 130 on the Weschler tests, it is possible that the test is underestimating the IQ. Hit 3 highs in the subtests on the Weschler and it is possible (but not absolute) that when tested on the SB LM, the child will score much higher. I know of kids with scores 70 points higher when tested on the SB LM.
You need to look at performance too. A child who scores 130 on the Weschler tests but who is capable of doing high school level work or college work at the age of 7 or 8 obviously has a much higher IQ than the Weschler indicated.
The Stanford Binet people are currently developing a test which will hopefully test up to 200. Part of the difficulty in the past has been finding a group of kids to norm the test on. I think this would be the first time in history there is enough kids known to be testing at the extremes that we can use them as a norm. Even with the Terman longitudinal study, there were not enough kids testing over 180 to be useful statistically.
Silverman et al say that the highest score scored is the correct score because you cannot measure what is not there. False lows are possible but false highs are not. But of course you need to be using a test which is validated for testing at the extremes. Do you know what test gave you the score in the 180’s?
This is getting long
Just realised that I didn’t really answer your questions. Put simply, there is a range in IQ results because of ceilings in IQ tests. Hit the ceiling on a particular test and the result becomes useless. If you have an IQ of 150 but the test only measures to 130, you get a false low.
My experience of this sort of range is that IRL, yes it is uncommon. The psychs who work with my kid do not have huge caseloads of kids like him. Most of the schools I have approached and been honest about his test results with, have said they cannot cope with him. Just in general, I haven’t met any kids his age who are as extreme as he is. I’ve certainly met parents who have said their kid is as advanced as mine but ummm, well, nope. However I do know some kids who leave my kid for dead in terms of achievement.
I don’t have an IQ number for my kid. I am not gonna shell out $1500 for the SB LM to get a number. We know the percentile he falls into and it is possible we will have him tested with the new SB when it is released. I’ve only delved into all this stuff because of the extreme problems we faced with him. Without the testing, we would be in much greater difficulty because we would be trying to force him to fit into a classroom which is entirely unsuitable.
LOL! Didn’t mean to start a pit war! I don’t really take this stuff to personally anyway, I’m just curious to understand. For all I know every one of my scores is completely wrong.
I took a bunch of IQ tests in 5th and 6th grade. I don’t remember the exact tests or what I scored exactly on each, I just remember the whole fiasco in general because A) they didn’t explain why they were making me take all these tests and B) it seemed strange to me that I had to keep being tested even after I’d already scored some kind of result. So I remember generally the range of scores, because I felt like they contained some sort of secret information that wasn’t being shared with me. (I discovered years later that they suspected some kind of learning disability because I was not responsive in class. So they were rather shocked at the results and kept restesting. Anyway.)
Hmmm, well that’s a good candidate for the high score, then. I was reading at the 5th grade level in kindergarten. I strongly suspect that a score that high was a fluke. I encountered plenty of kids in “gifted child” programs that make me look like a trained monkey, especially with math.
It seems to follow from what you said about ceilings, however, that getting a strange range of scores might not be unusual for anyone who is really scoring near the limits of the tests, and hence might actually be a common experience for Mensa types. (trying to return us to the original topic!)
Ren,
the SB LM is only accurate to the age of 8 yo. There’s no test that I know of that gives an accurate score at the 180 range over the age of 8 yo. All tests have a ceiling effect after that age
WOW! I never knew these tests were normalized to such young ages! You hear about adults taking IQ tests, but it sounds like the numbers probably don’t mean much. For me this is really a shocker. I’d like to read up on this a bit more. Can you give me some references or a place to start? Thanks for all the feedback!
I’ve heard of the SB LM being given at 3 but that’s unusually young. It was to a kid who later graduated from high school and began college at 6
Some good sites are:
this one’s especially useful on the subject of learning disabilities and giftedness
Hoagies has really good links on testing and issues like that.