I was listening to the radio when I heard the cliff notes, but essentially what I remember hearing was each test is designated to your age, and each test is timed. That’s all I remember.
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They are standardized by age. We know that the average 8 year old gets 10 questions correct on this subtest. If you are 9 years old and get 8 correct that is below the expectation for your age range. Extrapolate that over a number of tasks and you get an overall score that says where you are in relation to others your age.
They lose meaning and accuracy the older you are. There’s a massive difference between what a six year old knows and can do and what a twelve year old knows and can do. There’s very little difference once someone gets to be 25 or so.
Subtests can be very simply broken down into knowledge (crystallized intelligence if you want to look up more specifics) and tasks (fluid intelligence) which tests the ability to figure out unique situations.
Anyone who knows IQ testing will tell you that the overall IQ score is the least meaningful result to interpret. Knowing you are ‘above average’ says almost nothing about your intellect. Do you have a strong knowledge base or are you a quick thinker? Do you have a learning disability or exceptional strength in an area? Tests can be interpreted to answer much more important questions than what your IQ score is.
That being said (as someone already mentioned) a genius level score or an extremely low score do carry some weight.
Start with the idea of a bell curve, aka a “standard distribution.” Go google a picture of it right now to help. It should look like a hill divided into sections.
The hill represents a group of people, and each section represents a certain percentage of the total. So most of the people are in the middle two sections, and the farther you get out towards each edge, the lower and lower the percentage gets.
IQ tests measure people according to this bell curve. Right at the top center of the hill is an IQ of 100. 50% of all people are higher then 100, 50% are lower. That’s what IQ means.
What the test actually tests for is various intellectual skills. There may be math, there may be patterns, there may be shapes, some tests have physical puzzles you have to use your hands on. Each test is different. No matter what they measure though, the scores are placed on the bell curve. Each test has to be calibrated, so that 100 equals 50%. It takes a lot of testing on a lot of people to calibrate a test, which is all done long before you take it.
1. Design a test with a bunch of challenging questions.
2. Give that test to 1,000 people of a similar group (age/gender/location/etc).
3. Grade all of the tests and determine what the average score was.
4. Based on that average score, assign the people a grade on how far above or below the average they are. If the person is better than exactly 50% of the scores, they get a grade of 100. If they did better than 98% of the other people then they get a grade of 140.
5. Every so often update the average score based upon the results of other people taking the test.
An IQ test tries to measure your intelligence. Initially devised by a teacher that wanted to locate students falling behind, it has since been somewhat perverted into an innate intelligence test.
The test itself generally involves a 1 on 1 with a tester, they will give you various tasks, these will generally involve some maths, some pattern recognition, memorisation, memorisation but now recite in reverse. solving a labyrinth and all that kind of jazz. the idea is that these questions do not require learned knowledge, so no questions like “What is the capital city of Syria”
Then you take all the results, and you distribute the results on a standard distribution. So the average score is 100, and then we spread it so we make a nice bell curve. So that 68% of people fall within 85 to a 115, and 96% fall between 70 and 130.
Note, sometimes in fiction, you see people claim preposterous scores like “An IQ of 2000”, as IQ is determined by comparing you to other test takers, this doesn’t make much sense. Having an IQ of about 200 is basically being the smartest person on the planet, and you can’t really go higher.
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