Depends on what ‘highly educated’ means.
Yes. Highly educated does not necessarily mean more intelligent.
(i’m looking at you, boris)
I guess one can count self or informal education but the meaning of formal education level achieved is generally pretty well understood.
My guess, supported by that survey, is that we are shifted to the direction of a larger number with doctorate and professional degrees compared to the general population. That does NOT equal intelligence or smart but then neither does IQ.
I’d further guess that we have a wider breadth of college majors than a general population has. The nature of this board is it’s eclectic nature as much as anything else.
I did an official test 40 years ago to try and impress universities I was applying to (many of them bragged the average IQ of their studens). Just did the Norwegian test someone posted and my score is 50 points lower, ether one or both tests are very inaccurate or I have lost a lot of intelligence over the years. (probably the later)
Mine is about 130, but I’ve long since learned that IQ just means I’m good at taking tests. It certainly doesn’t mean I have good judgement, and I’ve got a long trail of poor life decisions to show for it.
I used to be a member of Mensa, and that was how I met my ex-husband, who eventually became verbally and emotionally abusive. After I left him, I stopped going to our local chapter events since he was still going. I’ve since moved to a new area and did consider joining the local chapter here. But it’s not something that my current husband is interested in, and I’m kinda thinking it might be best to leave that entire part of my life behind.
The 63% above 120 is certainly expected based on the posters here. What surprised me is the 6% BELOW 80%. Mental retardation is below 70 to 75 percent.
I love the Facebook tests that show a picture of Einstein and then say that, if you can successfully complete the task below, you have a genius IQ when the test is laughably easy.
To you!
People may be goofing on the poll.
Of course, they may be doing so in both directions.
My mom told me I’m special, so did my teachers, and my doctors, and all those nice people who talked to me when I went and got therapied told me I’m special too, so that must mean my IQ is super high, right?
Interesting, never heard of specific iq tests for high iq people before. Did you do it in hopes of joining one of the High IQ societies?
If you exclude the people who selected “never tested” (which you should) it’s 86% above 120. Higher than i expected, but like others pointed there’s reason to take these numbers with a huge grain of salt.
When I go down to the pond to fish. The smartest most gifted fish in there never takes the bait.
Just sayin’
It’s a little hard to recall my thought process from 45 years ago, but I think it was mainly curiosity, just to see how I’d do. IIRC, the results included a list of high-IQ groups and what their qualification standards were. I qualified for several.
At around that time I attended a meeting of Mensa, but was not impressed. I found that just being “smart” doesn’t make people interesting, and that Mensa members tended to be a bit full of themselves, often in unattractive or embarrassing ways.
Also, it was not a great way to meet women (which was probably one of my motives for going), since roughly 90% of the members were other single men.
I didn’t join Mensa, or any of the other groups, or go to any other meetings.
Yea, that’s how I’d imagine mensa to be, never having been there lol
See here.
A standard test has a very hard time differentiating among those who are over say 150, ie in the top 0.1%, and between those over 160, the top 0.01% (roughly)? Pretty useless.
My aside was about the quality of education relative to the level. That’s a subject for another thread.
Pertaining to this thread, college education has changed a great deal in our lifetimes. Many more people pursue degrees for specific career paths, and as discussed in your link college is geared now toward students of average intelligence instead of high performers.
Yeah, that’s how it was done for my son at age 3. An IQ test was required by our insurance company to get a diagnosis of autism (so they can test for cognitive delay.) My son showed all the classic signs of autism as well as speech delay, fine and gross motor delay, difficulties with independent behaviors, sensory and feeding problems, etc. Sometimes it seems like an endless list of stuff we need to address. But it was also clear to us that he is hella smart. By the time we got to that IQ test, he was into square numbers, cube numbers, negative integers, fractions and powers of ten. So we knew going in there was no chance of cognitive delay.
Because of his mental rigidity we had to drag him through that IQ test. He resisted every step of the way. Because of his obsession with numbers, we had to motivate him by drawing large numbers on the white board in between questions. We had to draw the numbers to his exact specifications including the type of commas we used. He is speech delayed but mostly for pragmatic speech. For the verbal comprehension he started just phoning it in, selecting the same letter for every question. He frequently grabbed things out of the proctor’s hands or got distracted trying to get into her desk. The only thing he really liked were the puzzles and block patterns. By the time we got through the IQ test I was thinking, “Well, they definitely know he’s autistic by now.”
Despite his distraction, compulsion, and complete apathy for multiple sections of the test and the fact that he scored average in verbal comprehension he scored in the genius range overall and extremely high in visual spatial. The interviewer said he’s the smartest kid she’s ever diagnosed with autism. She also told us it was imperative that he receive intensive therapy services as soon as possible in order to reach his full potential. She said his average speech skills should be considered a speech delay because of how cognitively advanced he is.
Everybody wants their kid to be smart, so it’s a good thing, but it is an additional challenge on top of everything else. The school isn’t quite sure what to do with a kid who is super advanced in some ways and significantly delayed in others. He’s going to be in special education for another year and then start kindergarten, but they want to start him at fifth grade math level. It’s anyone’s guess how that will go. He can’t write well, he rejects anything but what he wants to do, he’s impulsive and mentally rigid, overly perfectionistic to the point he will destroy any attempt that isn’t perfect and often just refuses to try if things look too hard.
I’ve had to have these conversations with my husband. You know, there’s a possibility he won’t be an academic success. A high IQ isn’t all it takes to make it in school. I’ve made my peace with that. We have reason to be hopeful because he seems to be doing well so far, but if he never works for NASA or whatever it won’t make his brain any less special, or make him any less special to me.
I fall pretty squarely in the smart and overeducated category myself, and my husband has a Ph.D in clinical psychology. I expected our kid to be smart, but I had not expected him to be this smart. At this point he’s turned into a little astrophysicist. This morning he asked me the biggest object in the universe. Thank God for Google. It’s the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall and is about ten billion light years across, in case you were wondering. And I attribute about 80% of my son’s development in this direction to things he’s watched on YouTube. Stuff I would never know or be able to teach him, he can learn about with the touch of a button.
I’m not entirely sure where he got it from. The other people in my family are smart, but not geniuses. The only person in my family who might have been that smart is my uncle, whose academic promise was destroyed by severe mental illness at the age of 19. He used to ramble a lot about astrophysics and theoretical physics, but I was never quite sure if it was crazy rambling or actually consistent with theories of the day. Sometimes I wish he was still here. Maybe he could help me understand my child’s brain, or at least answer some of his questions.
I’ve purposely given wrong answers on some of those “tests” and still received a high score. Many want you to pay for a report so you can show your friends how brilliant you are.
Correction: His visual spatial index was genius level not his overall score.
See? This is why you should never trust what people tell you about IQ on the Internet.
The general takeaway is that because of behavioral interference it’s pretty difficult to get an accurate IQ score for a young autistic kid.
And on these tests there’s no accounting for freakish math ability.
In a case like your son’s, the Full Scale score is a pretty meaningless index of his abilities, as it is for many people.
Group/on-line tests usually don’t provide a good strengths/weaknesses profile like those yielded by more comprehensive assessments.