“IQ only measures the ability to take IQ tests” - What?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Based on that equation, my I.Q. has dropped significantly since I was a six-year-old. :wink: I don’t really have anything significant to add to this discussion but, based on my own school experiences, the expectations placed on students (from school officials and/or parents) about their future plans - educational, professional and social - can be highly unfair and detrimental to the decisions the students do make, and what those decisions lead to.

Oh, just ignore me. I’m a bitter, bitter young man. :frowning: Reading this thread probably doesn’t help me any either. :wink:

Anyhoo…

22

Then why don’t they just say IQ tests are a measure of school performance, years of education, job performance, and social outcomes instead of some vaguely defined abstract concept?

23

ha- sorry 'bout that… after dividing your mental age by your physical age you gotta multiply it by 100. :smiley:

So, If I have the knowledge of a twenty year old and I’m only ten years of age, then 20/10 = 2 x 100 gives me an IQ of 200. Outstanding Einstein’s got nothing on me. With the average intelligence of twenty year olds and the potential that children have to learn this is not an impossibility.

My son (pats back) scores consistently at the 99th percentile in his peer group. He works on a college level in the 7th grade and was doing geometry and algebra in the third grade. He scored near perfect on his tasp tests he brought home today. He plays varsity sports in football, baseball and track. He is getting his Eagle merit badge this summer. At nine he received his ham license and is working towards getting his pilots license. He plans on going into aerospace engineering (he wants to be a rocket scientist) He’s already building them. I taught him trajectories a few years ago for an actual weather ballon experiment with NASA. There’s a balloon facility in Palestine. (my home town) He’ll probably get a full scholarship to the Air Force Academy. He’s already talked with them. His IQ was near 200 at last testing. I think that is probably too low. He’s doing calculus and trig now…plus he loves chemistry and hell all the sciences. He used to attend my physics classes when he was five. He knew more than some of the morons in the class. I taught him to read music at five or six. He plays practically everything.
Besides doing some bragging…(sorry) I guess my point is this. Teach’em young and stay with it. Let them choose their field of endeavor. Just try and make sure they do choose something. Teach them all you know and they’ll find the rest on their own.
BTW Excellent health is dependent on good diet and exercise. Make sure they get that too.
All of these things contribute to a strong mind and body. Bye

24

Mine’s even higher, and I’m at least as much a failure as you are.

25

Why, my IQ is three times yours - but I’m four times the failure! Ha! :stuck_out_tongue:

26

My daughter has taken the IQ test twice now, and was close, but didn’t have a high enough score to get into the GT program.

Whenever she takes the standardized tests for the state and No Child Left Behind, she gets almost all of the questions correct and is in the high 90’s for percentile. She says she is bored in class and says she doesn’t like school.

At home, she writes stories on her computer about “mythical creatures”. And she reads books that are a few years above her grade level.

When I told her that to be in the GT program, she’d have to take a bus to another school, she said, “I don’t want to board the bus!” Not “get on the bus” not “ride the bus”, but “board the bus”.

So one of the questions she missed on the test this time looked like this.

"r _ _ _ b _ w

It has all the colors."

She was, of course supposed to say “rainbow”. But she wasn’t thinking that way. She knows that the color white has all the colors. To her, a rainbow only has seven colors. I think that’s a smart answer. The IQ tests can’t measure imagination or “thinking outside the box”.

<Sigh> So to put these children in a gifted program, you have to pass a test. That’s the only thing they look at. And I think this is just as bad as deciding a kid is at risk because he didn’t do well on a certain test on a certain day.

27

t’keela what test was used with your son? I’m presuming as you’re talking about ratio IQ, they used the SB LM?

FWIW the SB V, the currently normed Stanford Binet is not finding kids with 200+ IQs at the same rate as the SB LM. Kids are dropping down 50 to 60 points and it’s all looking a lot more like a normal bell curve. Which is exactly what was to expected as the SB LM was producing insanely inflated IQs. Outnormed, outdated IQ tests tend to do that. It will be interesting to see what happens when Riverside release the part of the manual for testing gifted kids. I know that at one point Silverman was talking about a 300+ ceiling but it’s now revised to a 200+ ceiling but to the best of my knowledge no kids have scored that.

28

Now Mom, we know your child is wonderful, but true intelligence would have allowed her to realize that the answer they were looking for WAS rainbow, especially given that clue. They didn’t ask “what has all the colors?” They asked, “what seven letter word starting with r, ending with w and a b in fifth position has all the colors?” You know, “all the colors of the rainbow”? You don’t do her any favors by making her think she’s just too darn smart for those people. Intelligence is partly practicality. Teach her not to be so rigid! :smiley:

29

Now Mom, we know your child is wonderful, but true intelligence would have allowed her to realize that the answer they were looking for WAS rainbow, especially given that clue. They didn’t ask “what has all the colors?” They asked, “what seven letter word starting with r, ending with w and a b in fifth position has all the colors?” You know, “all the colors of the rainbow”? You don’t do her any favors by making her think she’s just too darn smart for those people. Intelligence is partly practicality. Teach her not to be so rigid

Posted by kittenblue

 Perhaps my post sounded too much like bragging about my daughter and not enough about the ability to score high on IQ tests.  My point was that someone could  score below the gifted range and still be gifted.
The question I put in my post was from the IQ test exactly as it was written.  The teacher who gave her the test showed it to me.  Unless you mean that my daughter didn't get the subtext of the question or overanalyzed it .
 My daughter isn't perfect and I do not make her think that she is too smart for anybody.  We talked about the question and she told me her reasoning.  I actually believe that her reasoning was valid.  But, it's more important to me that she be capable and happy and believe in herself than she get into a gifted program.  I am not the type of mother who has to have her child in a gifted program.  I was just concerned that she was bored in school.
 While I know that "every parent thinks her child is gifted"  I'm also a teacher and I worked with many children and I think I'm a good judge as to who has "true intelligence".
30

Sorry if it sounded like I was ragging on you, Gail, I think I was hearing some other mother’s voice in my memory. Just as long as your daughter understood why rainbow was the right answer, even though it wasn’t “technically” right…that’s all I’m worried about.

31

Because the IQ myth would become public knowledge.

32

It doesn’t even matter that she wasn’t thinking along those lines. I’d like to know how “knowing” that answer is worth a point in the calculation of IQ? Maybe the word “rainbow” is rarely used in her everyday life, or there are few if any rainbows that she has ever come across. IQ test, no matter how much work they put into them will be sensitive to culture, religion, geography, age, sex, and gawd knows what else.

That IQ tests are designed for different age groups, the fact alone, speaks volumes of how difficult it is to quantify intelligence. The fact that it may be the most reasonable tool to for quantifying intelligence, alone does not make it a valid measurement of intelligence.

33

“rainbow”?
For one thing it helps to measure your vocabulary.

Just because someone provides a different answer than what is commonly given doesn’t mean they are wrong. It also doesn’t necessarily cause them to get a lower score. If she said white, instead of rainbow, she probably scored higher in one area (perhaps logic) which is an area related to complex thought but lower in another area (perhaps recognition skills) her ability to simply fill in the blanks. If she didn’t know what a rainbow was then that’d be different.
Remember the IQ score is a comparison of her answers against those “normally” given.
My son occasionally “screwed up” on questions like this because he “overthought” the question. He finally realized how to recognize WHAT the tester/teacher/whoever was asking. It was tough getting him to “think like them” however. I remember a question he missed when he was like five or six. It had to do with the similarity between pens and pencils. I don’t recall the exact wording but his response was that they weren’t alike because pencils used lead or graphite while pens used ink. When prodded about their usage he said…everybody knows that you write with them.

His mother and I taught him to read at an four. He had already been picking it up before then from his older sister. When he turned five I showed him how to use a dictionary and encyclopedias (so many questions). By the third grade he was doing algebra and geometry. The school asked me to quit teaching him at home. :eek: (Behavior problems) He was bored and was always correcting the teacher. In the fourth grade his math teacher in order to put him in his place challenged him to an oral quiz in fractiions, in front of the class. He beat her. He had pi memorized to like 20 places by then. (he was GT & and in AP advanced placement in all courses)

Primaflora what test indeed? He’s taken every test I can think of. Stanford Benet is one for sure. I also realize that standardized tests on children aren’t very good indicators, simply because the low age ratios produce high scores. My estimate of 200 is not just test results. It is also my own opinion since I have observed his behavior, academically, socially, etc. for these many tears. I also have taught students at the high school and junior high level, in all subjects. As well as some college courses during grad. school. My personal estimate of 200+ is based on his intelligence in comparison to my estimation of the general population.

He has been active in sports and the Boy Scouts to help us provide him social and community skills. His peers are not typically his own age. Thankfully he has become more and more popular with his own classmates in the past couple of years. This is due to his atheletic ability and he’s developing physically from all of the exercise. The atheletic prowess (I think) is due in part to the fact that he was in t-ball and little-league for several years, until he grew tired of it. He has never been forced to stay in something, only to give it a try to out satisfaction that he gave it his best effort. Except for the scouts, he had to endure a few months but stuck it out. (BSA isn’t cool) But the trips are! and you gotta earn 'em by staying in it long enough.

Sorry again if this is hijacked but it seems relevant. My best friend, who died a couple of years ago, had a saying he used a lot. It was along these lines.
“We may all be geniuses…the problem is that we all know different shit.”
He was absolutely correct in that he was a genius. Despite low grades in school and if he’d ever taken a standard IQ test he’d probably score around 100 more or less. But if a test were devised on common sense and mechanical abilities…he’d be off the charts.

In closing, to the “myth” theory… and the idea that folks with less education score lower. That’s actually a myth in itself. A good test and/or tester doesn’t include questions from demographics that aren’t those of the subject. We aren’t all compared against each other.
If I don’t have a high school education, my test should ask questions for my level of education, age and experience. Likewise if I hold a PhD or whatever.
That being said, it is only a tool used to make estimations and/or comparisons. IQ scores (like my son) for instance…don’t necessarily mean that he is smarter. It reflects what he has been exposed to and when. It attempts to show his potential but makes no claims as such. It’s more pseudo-than-science. :wink:

I should proof this before I post it, but I’m outta time. See y’all later, t-k.

BTW if you don’t like the results you get…don’t sweat it. It don’t mean all that anyway.

34

does a rainbow not have all the colours, including UV and IR, but we can only see the 7 colours with the naked eye?

35

Wait, so your saying you scored 168 on your second IQ test or over 4 1/2 standard deviations above the norm?

This means your in the top 99.999 percentile of IQ takers. Colour me impressed, or possibly sceptical.

36

I’m not debating the psychometrician’s concept of “g” or general intelligence as a tool to measure intelligence, even though I certainly think that it’s empirically clear that intelligence does exist in varying degrees. The OP deals with correlations of certain kinds of achievement with IQ results — that’s all. However, since this thread has drifted so far from the OP already, I suppose it will do no harm to ask an unrelated question myself.

There’s been some talk about the relevance of certain types of questions some say they have seen on standardized tests. They don’t appear to be describing ‘culture free’ tests. I’m curious as to what a culture free question looks like — since while I may have seen a ‘culture free test,’ it wasn’t described to me that way. I suspect this online “IQ test,” which takes about a minute to load, is composed of what might be thought of as ‘culture free’ type questions. Not actual standardized IQ questions used by professionals but, nevertheless descriptive of those types of questions. Does anyone know what professionally administered culture free questions look like and if so, do they look anything like what is shown at this site ----- That is, they don’t assume much or anything in the way of “knowledge,” if these questions even do that - Thanks -

http://home.hetnet.nl/~rijk42/progressivUS.swf

37

IQ tests have trouble with scores over 150 or so; some of them cap out there and just say “more.” So I’m told that scores > 150 should be taken with something of an (additional?) grain of salt. Also, the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet have a slightly different range, so you can pick up a few points just by switching from one to the other.

However, there are about 300 million people in the US, and even at 99.999 percentile (and I would argue that’s too high, because of the “blurring” of > 150 scores), that leaves a minimum of 3000 people who would score in that range, probably more like 2-3 times that depending on the number. That such people would be attracted to a message board for “fighting ignorance,” and in particular to a thread on IQ seems quite reasonable.

38

I doubt it very much. First objection is that it would really hard to take for someone who’s color blind. But more importantly, it seems to work on the assumption that progress goes from left to right, which is fine for anyone raised using the Latin alphabet. But what of those reading from right to left, or up to down?

In Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond argues that ‘stone age’ people from New Guinnea are actually smarter, as a group, than the more ‘civilized’ from western societies. The reason being that evolution selected for resistence to bacteria in developed countries, but for smartness that didn’t go from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. Something to ponder when discussing iq-tests.

39

The number of colors in the rainbow has been arbitrarily put at seven (to match the number of notes used in music, I believe). You could as well say there are six or ten of them.

40

Thanks. Just for my own purposes - have you seen a professionally administered culture free test?

I haven’t read Guns, Germs and Steel. When you say ‘selecting for resistance to bacteria’ I’m guessing Jared Diamond is talking about the Black Death during the 1300s? Again, I haven’t read the book but do you know specificallywhat Diamond says about evolution selecting or not selecting for resistence to bacteria in ‘non-developed areas’ over time rather than one event. If so, how does he distinguish the effects? And how does evolution selecting for resistance to bacteria - prevent or moderate evolution from also selecting for intelligence? Hell - maybe I should just pick up his book. :slight_smile:

On the other issue - Certainly, since the test is in color, a person with known color blindness wouldn’t take this test. That said - I’m not certain that goes to whether these are ‘culture fair’ questions or not. Maybe I don’t understand your objection.

As to the ‘progessions’ you mentioned – while not pretending this is a valid test – many of those progressions can be read right to left or up and down with the same answer. And it’s the same answer for the same reason. Go back and take a second look and you’ll might be surprised how often this is true. I was. Granted, some of the other progressions require you to see the progression in one direction only.

With the ‘pattern’ questions, the way it is read doesn’t appear relevant.