No. There’s no real reason for anyone of average or above average intelligence to ever have their IQ tested. Proof of an above average score can do nothing for you except perhaps qualify you for Mensa membership, or for admission into some school gifted programs if you are a K-12 student.
The primary purpose and IMHO pretty much the only legitimate use for IQ testing is to help identify people with learning disabilities or mental handicaps.
As much of a pain-in-the-butt as “Marylin” is (and you know who I’m talking about), she made a good point about test-taking in general. She said something to the effect of the following:
When they ask you who wrote “Romeo and Juliet,” don’t bother discussing Bacon. Just say “Shakespeare” and go on to the next question.
As far as whether IQ tests measure intelligence, it’s kinda hard to say, since, as others pointed out, there’s a bootstrap problem: How can you tell if you have an objective measure of intelligence without already having an objective measure of intelligence?
But I would guess that, at a minimum, IQ/SAT score/whatever are rough indicators of intelligence.
Sheer, unadulterated brilliance is obviously overrated.
what if there is a different intelligence*effort curve for each range of math scores. assuming the Idiot Quotient is accurate for the moment. a person with a 150 IQ doing 3 hrs of math per week could score 750 while a person with a 130 IQ could get the same score doing 5 hrs per week. of course this assumes other factors equal like teachers and quality of books, peaceful home life, etc.
it might be safe to say a person with an IQ of 90 could never score 750. so a certain score on the SAT may mean that the individual has a certain minimum level of dumbness. this does not mean that people with lower scores are more dumb however.
i’m not sure how much that means since i believe the schools are designed to teach people to think stupid anyway. why can’t the geography teachers figure out it makes no sense to call europe a continent. it is merely a peninsula hanging off the west end of asia. it’s that feudian thing. peninsula envy.
Dal Timgar
I’m not sure they’re even useful in cases like this. Two of the students in the special ed preschool-k program I worked in had to be tested this spring for their 3 year IEP evaluations (for the 6th birthdays. One child has autism, the other has Downs) and the testers thought that the tests gave inaccurate pictures of what the boys were capable of. Neither was very cooperative with taking the tests, so that obviously skewed the results to a large degree. The boy with Downs had scores for sectional tests ranging from the 50s to 108(the lower scores generally were earned the days he was throwing things all over the place, and the higher ones when he was being cooperative), which made the test hard to score over-all. The psychologist seemed to think that with such huge discrepancies, it measured nothing accurately but his williness/unwilliness to take the sections of the test. :rolleyes:
Something I found interesting was that converter page that johncole gave has a conversion into SAT scores. According to that, given my Stanford-Binet score, it seems to think I should have done about 150 points better on the SATs than I did in reality. (btw this is a link to a program that will convert pre-1995 scores into “modern” ones http://englishplus.com/pub/satcon20.zip ) Which does not take into consideration that going by the S-B score I do fall into the genius range (not by much, though), but can’t do math to save my life. How many people do you know scored 250 points higher on the verbal section?