They aren’t very common at all unless there is a special need to be given one. A traditional IQ test takes several hours and cost about $400 - $500 dollars if done privately. School psychologists often use them to determine which students should be in gifted programs or special needs education. The vast majority of people have never taken a real IQ test. Like I said earlier, I have taken a few of them but the circumstances were unique and not applicable to most people.
The people that post to most IQ threads are simply making up numbers out of their ass or used the scores from 10 minute Internet tests, tacked on about 15 points, and then posted it here. It is laughable yet disgusting that so many Dopers are flat out liars.
I’ve always found that a bit strange as well. When I was growing up (I’m 30, and grew up in SW Ontario), IQ testing was very rare, we did have a gifted program (I forget what the actual name was) but your admittance was solely determined by your teacher.
I WAS tested but it certainly wasn’t because anybody thought I was a brilliant kid. Nobody has really ever been completely honest about things, so I don’t really know why they tested me, but my hearing was tested on numerous occasions, my vision once or twice, other tests that I really only remember take up a lot of time, and IQ tests. I only remember the IQ test because I pestered my mother and father for long enough that he eventually mentioned that I had been tested. My brothers and sister were never tested but one thing is for sure, my they are all far smarter than myself. (I’m way stronger though )
I look back with shame at the rather extended period of my life that I looked down on the world and it’s intelligence but I’m quite thankful for second year physics. When you drop a 19% on a test you studied really hard for and find yourself on the far left of the mark distribution graph, it puts you in your place.
How can I tell? I consider people intelligent not by looking at their test scores or how much education they have had but by how easily they can understand new concepts. So, someone who has a master’s degree but can’t figure out how to attach a file to their email is not smart, the janitor who teaches himself how to create his own web page or build his own energy efficient vacation home is smart.
A lot of times just talking to people you get a sense of their intelligence. How they perceive current events, if they can objectively see entire issues, what type of interests and hobbies they have, how they embrace and quickly understand new concepts. Intelligence to me isn’t what you know, it’s how easily you can learn and an openness to learning.
Just because you would rather earn a living off your intellect doesn’t mean that other people would, that’s just a personality issue. Intelligence can also mean examining your own life more deeply than just staying in one place without ever considering other options. Maybe a person has the choice of a high stress high income career or low stress, more time with family and lower income career. If that leads them to be what most people see as underemployed that doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent. A lot of people satisfy their intellectual side outside of work.
And I absolutely agree that hard work gets most people further than intelligence. I tell my kids that all the time.
But even you are relying on your parents word for it. Do they know it was an IQ test as opposed to some other sort of test that may or may not have had anything to do with intelligence?
Now that I think of it, I don’t know of any person in my or my kids experience who have ever been given an IQ test. I used to be married to a special ed teacher and I never heard her or her colleagues ever mention IQ testing as having been done in their school.
Ignore that. You stated that it is 5000 member self-selecting subset of nearly two hundred million & I misread you. I thought the two hundred million referred to was a calculated number of people with an IQ 130 or higher in the world and that you were saying that the subset was taken wholly from that group. I have re-read and see that you were referring to the number of adults in the USA. Quite why that number is relevant I don’t know, but anyway.
But I still don’t understand how you can think that the IQ of the average doper could possibly be anywhere near 130. You state that there are 5000 members - OK, fine. That these members have a higher IQ than average - I don’t have an issue with that. But then you pull out of nowhere that it is statistically possible for the average doper to have an IQ within the top 2% of the population. That just seems ridiculous.
Why do you keep referring to the size of the pool? What does that have to do with anything? There are 13 million Mormons in the world. It would only take a very small percentage of these to be regular posters for every member on here to be a Mormon. But it is still statistically unlikely.
This is the second or third time I’ve seen mention of window-licking. Is this a notoriously common pastime for those of … lower intelligence? I’ve never observed this except in my dog. She’s definitely not a genius but I figured it was more a dog thing than a moron thing.
All of this talk about IQ tests made me wonder how common it is as well. I’ve never been tested, thought I. Then I remembered having to take that test in 7th grade to see if I should be in Honors track. I was put in the almost-honors class. A year later, they had me take it again, and I went into Honors. Maybe I was just borderline. I remember thinking it was weird because there were all these questions about shapes and stuff, but the test ended up telling them which English/history classes to put me in.
Anyway, I don’t know if it was really an IQ test or not, and I was never told any scores from it. Then again, my mom wouldn’t have told me anyway; they didn’t want me to think I was too smart for my own good.
I missed this post before, sorry. I hope you are not misunderstanding me…I did not particularly object to the thread until NightRabbit’s post that I linked to. Telling stories about these kinds of childhood experience is one thing…calling the average, regular kids morons is something else.
I also don’t think it’s false modesty to refrain from patrticipating in such a thread. It may be relevant to the thread, but the thread doesn’t seem to serve much purpose, either.
It really doesn’t mean all that much, though, I mentioned my score on the conversion thing because it was relevant, but all it really means is that I like to read and I love math and logic puzzles. This is actually socially isolating, because I don’t need other people to do those things, and most of the people around me aren’t interested in the same things. So why is it bragging? I never said other people should be like me, and in fact I said that I wish I could write like some of the people here, as that talent is more important to me. It sounds to me like the score is more important to you than it is to me.
I think it varies on the school district and what the relevant authority decided to blow a lot of extra funding on. I was never given an IQ test in school, and like a few others, I don’t know anyone who was.
Standardized testing popularity varies from place to place. Here in Ontario, we don’t even have any equivalent to SATs. Your university admission is based on your marks in your six best senior year courses (what we now call Grade 12, but used to call OACs; it’s confusing.) There’s no other method of admission. I never took a single standardized aptitude test of any sort in 19 years of kindergarten, primary, secondary and post-secondary education.
It’s thus almost certainly true that here in a big, rich province of 12,000,000 people, most people cannot tell you what their IQ is because it’s never been properly tested at any time in their lives.
That brings up a point I would like to make about IQ tests. To a certain extent IQ tests can’t really test a person’s IQ. You could have people with identical IQ’s who could score very differently on the same test. If a child does a lot of math and logic puzzles and loves to read they’re going to probably score better on the test. They’ve had more practice at all those things. Then there’s the child who loves basketball and baseball more than anything. That child could be more intelligent but because he hasn’t had the practice with logic and math and reading he could score much lower.
You know, I’m really not sure? My dad’s a doctor that goes to a psychiatric conference every year so I’d assume he does but yeah, I really don’t know. It IS entirely possible that they were placating me, they didn’t ever give me a score after all.
Gah, kind of a miserable experience either way though. I’d get called to the office where they would usher me to some little dungeon by our gym where one of my parents and some other guy were and the other guy would ask me questions for a while, (and in some cases, attach things to me) not tell me anything then send me back to kindergarden.
Do you mean that everyone sat down with a psychologists for a few hours individually and took an IQ test? That is a little hard to believe especially at that late age because there is little point. Group tests correlate with IQ tests but technically they aren’t.
You have a severe definition problem there. The major IQ tests measure simply give an IQ score because that is what an IQ score is by definition. If one of the major IQ tests determines an IQ score then that is what it is. OTOH, the test did not measure musical ability, artistic ability, drive, or morality.
IQ scores are completely statistics driven and they don’t attempt to measure everything that might make an interesting or supposedly smart person. Instead they strive to predict success in educational environments. However, that is simply about playing the odds over a population. It doesn’t directly relate to individuals.
Oh, I wasn’t responding to you, Sarahfeena, but to the general idea that mentioning your test scores or whatever automatically made you a braggart. I agree with your post, for what it’s worth.
I don’t think not participating in the thread is false modesty either, but I also don’t think that participating in the thread is a sign of arrogance. Perhaps some posters did participate out of a desire to brag, but it seemed like a good number just wanted to share some common experiences. Either way, it’s interesting that so many people have their panties in a twist over it. (Not you, Sarahfeena, just Dopers in general.)
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