I had a psychology class this morning where we discussed different methods of testing a large population, and IQ tests came up. After the discussion I was curious and decided to go and research some more, and I found out that they’d originally been developed to find children in schools who needed extra help and weren’t as accurate for adults, yet were still used to do some less than savoury things to certain adults some decades later.
I know IQ doesn’t really let you know exactly what you’re intelligent in, a physicist and artist may have exactly the same scores, but what it is actually measuring? When I was 11 I took the official Mensa test and scored 162, and from my research today anything above 145 is I the top 0.13%. If IQ was strictly measuring intelligence I would be some sort of super genius, and while I am top of all my classes I really don’t apply myself to them and have a terrible work ethic. I mostly squander whatever intelligence I have playing video games and consuming as much media as possible to stave off an existential crisis.
Since I’m clearly not the next Einstein, is IQ measuring brain capacity or potential to become smart, or is it just completely useless. Because I know for a fact all that the Mensa test I took is good for is segregating all the pretentious snobs in our society and putting them all in one place, I went to a single one of those meetings and it was awful.
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If I remember correctly, the exact value of IQ is measured based on a proportional scaling from statistics. I believe specifically standard deviation units, but multiplied by something afterwards.
So if you’ve ever seen a bell curve before where something like 80% of the population is in the fat end and and 20% is in the tails of the graph. Standard deviation units will tell you how far away you are from the center, and thus how unusual you are from the general public.
IQ is intended to be a measure of how you solve problems, particularly ones to which you’ve not been exposed previously. For an example, IQ tests might measure your deductive reasoning by presenting you a series of facts and then asking you to figure out what something is without prior knowledge (this is an elementary example, but hopefully you get the point:) Triangles have three sides, and bicycles have two wheels. Which of these images is a tricycle? [Shows image of a tricycle, a 4-wheeler, and a triple Venn diagram]
The idea is that it measures how quickly we are capable of learning and applying reason, which is also why we use similar assessments for other members of the animal kingdom. Crows are presented with food inside a test tube and a wire, and we observe how they bend the wire into a hook and use it as a tool to get the food out. Chimpanzees are similarly tested with stacking puzzles and learning sign language.
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