Quote:
Originally posted by Timber Loftis:
Vaskez, as with all things, and as you've noted, it's SUBJECTIVE!!!!!  It also means that using the same test your IQ drops steadily as you grow older. You can only be so old mentally, and your rate of knowledge/"mental age" increase can't possible keep up with a denominator governed by time, that old gypsy man.
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Actually AFAIK the quotient part isn't actually relevant anymore. When the idea of IQ was first thought of that's what they were doing - a mental age/chronological age quotient - primarily for children. However, as you've pointed out, that is not appropriate for adults since it doesn't make sense that your intelligence would automatically decrease with age (though of course your reaction time, memory etc do degenerate, but certainly a 30 year old would not be any better on average than when they are 40). So it's not actually calculated that way anymore. I think they just give you 'a score' (which is not very meaningful) and compare it to the norms for whatever age bracket you are in (which are also just mean scores for the huge sample of people who have done the test in controlled conditions). Then the average for whatever your age range is 'average intellienge', then above average is one standard deviation above, and really smart is two, and genius is three standard deviations above the mean (or something like that).