Iq Sceptic

True random thought here, probably a swing and a miss.

I've never really trusted the concept of IQ points. I suspect that they are largely meaningless.

I also love the sales pitch:

"Hey!, dyu wanna know your IQ?"

"erm, why would I want to know that?"

"Well...you could tell people at social events."

"Oh, right. Will they be impressed?"

"No. Most of them will not have the context to even know if the number you give them is above average, and ALL of them will think much less of you for having felt the need to bring it up"

"So it's like a badge of insecurity?"

"kind of. it also costs money to find it out."

As far as I'm aware, one's IQ is a measure of the ability to intake information. This is rendered totally useless if it isn't coupled with a desire to learn. We all know people who are incredibly bright who have squandered their potential, and many of the people who excel in their fields have earned their expertise after struggling through some kind of disadvantage.

I think most people would also agree that there are many different kinds of intelligence and a single sliding scale is no adequate measure of something so complex.

My suspicion is that it's a fairly arbitrary scale that only becomes significant at its extremes.

But fucking hell, I've seen two people refer to their own in order to score points in internet arguments tonight (not on here) and is there anything else that makes you sound more like an insecure child?

Maybe if you were having a row about Literature and decided to tell your opponent that his analysis of Emily Bronte was wrong because of how much you can bench, and because of that girl you kissed last summer (you wouldn't know her, she goes to a different school.)

I suspect my own would be pretty middling. I did well in school, but I never found it easy. If I stopped working hard, I stopped doing well. I think If I ever paid to find out my own IQ I'd feel obliged to cut about 5 points off straightaway. If people are curious to know theirs then I guess to each their own, but it's definitely no argument for anything except a fool and his money being soon parted.

 

I'm also docking 3 for failing to capitalise the Q in my title.

 

the capitalization is an issue with the forum software. there's a lot of really confusing titles out there because the forum thinks our collective IQ is too low to capitalize what we meant to capitalize.

 

you probably did

but dock 9 for not knowing that the forum drops the capitalization on its own.

 

See how you are?

 

why should it cost money to find out? when i was in school they used to give them to everyone for free.
of course they sort of weren't supposed to tell you, but a lot of times you could sort of see over their sholder,
of course then again that was before the days of personal computers.

one thing i did notice, is how sensitive the results were to what kind of mood i was feeling on the day i took them.
every time the result was wildly different. so have to agree i'm not sure how much they actually mean anything.

in principal i understand the concept,
which is about the rate at which you can learn,
NOT the total amount of knowledge you can aquire or retain.

for that you need both the rate, which again varies widely with emotional state,
AND how long you're going to live in order to do so,
which that is even less determinate.

(on a slightly different though perhaps not unrelated subject:
when i took my s.a.t.'s to enter university, it just happened to be one of my good days,
the result of which being i aced them, dispite having been a dee minus student in high school.
it was also, 5 years after leaving home and highschool, during which i'd been into and out of the air force,
and generally on my own for a year or so after that)

 

ffs, I'm getting dafter by the hour.

 

I was thinking of the supervised Mensa test, which costs about 30 quid. I understand that free/online ones are considered as worthless as the paper they aren't written on.

I'm interested to learn that you had to do them at school. Were your classes or anything else in your education adapted to the results, do you know?

I struggled with maths at school so I sat some tests to see if I was discalculic/dyslexic and so on, and they tested my verbal reasoning and spatial skills too, but they weren't proper IQ tests, and they weren't compulsory, I had them done outside of school.

 

i think it was some kind of fad in the educational system at the time. back when they were honestly trying to figure out the best ways to teach and how people learn.
this was in the u.s. in the 50s and early 60s.

and yes, they were experimenting with different ways to teach reading and math skills especially.

 

So would you have been placed into classes with kids with similar scores to yours?

 

People who don't like IQ tests are usually those who score low on them.

 

In the 70's also they were handing out IQ scores in high school like it wasn't anything special. We never even knew which test was what. There would be days of dang tests each year...like 3 days of testing.

It seems that maybe by the time I was a Sr in high school, they didn't worry about testing the seniors. I guess they figured nothing was going to change at that point.

I was never aware of a reason for it, such as they were experimenting with how to teach us better.

 

We were placed in classes according to 2 things: the grades we made determined all throughout school how we were placed, and in high school there was an additional factor - if we wanted a vocational course of study, or if we wanted college prep.

 

That's interesting. It seems like these days there's more of a push towards trying to mix ability levels within classrooms to get underachievers aspiring to higher grades and working harder.

 

i lived and went to school in relatively rural/wilderness communities. there was only one class for each year of students, so no, it wasn't about placing each of us,
it was about trying to measure what would be the most effective ways of teaching us, all to together, aproximately 26-30 to a class room.

that was in k-8. high school was of course by subject. high school was yr9-12. there was no such thing yet as middle school.
high school was of course smaller class sizes. entire graduating class of my high school was 80 students.

 

i scored well on IQ tests


its the Rorschach ones that screwed me royally

 

That really sounds a great deal like the way my school was, except we had 120 in the graduating class, and there were always 2 classes (1A and 1B) for each grade until high school, which as you said was 9-12. In grades 9-12 my rural community combined with another rural community and there we were put with students that had already gone 8 yrs without us. lol

 

yup, same here. our high school gathered from a much larger area then our k-8. some of the kids in my highscool were bussed from communities so small, that they had gone to the very few one room schoolhouses that still existed in really remote communities. their bus rides each way to high school and back were up to two and half, even three hours long. there was not such thing as student parking at high schools in those days either. parents who had cars were allowed to pick up and drop off, but that was it. the only parking was for teachers and admin, and of course the fleet of school buses.

another little side note, i remember in third grade, we were all asked what we though of the idea of using dr suess as introductory reading for kindergarten and first grade.
(jane can run was all there was when i stared. fortunately i had learned how to read before kindergarten. with a little help from my dad. never did learn how to spell reall gud though)
the topic of teaching methods was a topic of popular conversation as well as promenent in education journals, which were sometimes found in libraries,
and even occasionally mentioned on other kinds of magazenes, like argosy and popular mechanics.

 

that was still going on when i was in school too, actually way more than 3 days of testing. it was never IQ tests though, just various "standardized" tests that had various purposes. most of them didn't seem to affect anything, although one of them in second grade determined who got into "whiz kids" and one in high school was required for graduation. and then there was the ACT of course, which was supposedly really important for getting into college but in reality if you got two questions right you would be accepted into anything below an ivy league school. there were some scholarships based on that one though, so at least there was some tangible benefit.

 

I’ve always enjoyed taking tests from SAT’s to The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Test to midterms and finals in college.

I've never been a skeptic when it comes to IQ scores, then again I scored a 120 on the world’s hardest IQ test in the now defunct OMNI magazine



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