Harder IQ test

[Aelia Jusa]

Yes exactly, Azred [img]smile.gif[/img] . Which is why I actually do prefer the Raven's Progressive Matrices as the best of the IQ tests, because it actually is measuring your aptitude rather than achievement, as IQ is supposed to (though of course pattern recognition is very narrow - not perfect by any stretch - someone with poor spatial ability would at the very least take a lot longer to do as well as someone with average spatial ability, and spatial ability should not be considered part of intelligence). Your level of schooling and experience shouldn't in principle have anything to do with what your potential for achievement is, but of course it is difficult to test 'what could you learn' if you don't test 'what have you learned'.

On average you could reasonably say that if you have achieved highly in school then you would have a high IQ (that is, high potential for things requiring 'intelligence' (defined how? Everyone has a different idea )), so IQ tests will have a high proportion of true positives since they correlate very highly with academic achievement and have a significant number of questions that reqire formal education. But there are many cases where you would have false positives (people who did very well at school and score highly who really have average intelligence) and false negatives (people who didn't do well at school and score poorly who really have very high intelligence). So the addition in nearly all IQ tests (and I'm talking the real ones here, not the shite internet ones [img]tongue.gif[/img] ) of items that require at least some form of formal education will never be appropriate for the whole population. It's a problem because people put a lot of stock into IQ tests - they are used for a whole range of things, job selection and school selection being the two most important ones, and yet they have so many flaws. They are very reliable measures of intelligence, in that while it is possible to get fluctuating scores, if you take the test under similar favourable conditions a number of times the variability in your score will be minimal, but not all that valid, which is the most important thing. Case in point - the 'average' IQ for Americans has increased over the past few decades, according to IQ tests. Because they are getting smarter? No, because their test-taking ability is improving

And of course the cultural and national specificity of a lot of the tests means their wide-range applicability is lacking as well.

Oh well. I'm sure the IQ test frenzy that seems to have struck will die down soon - did last time

[ 05-18-2003, 02:55 AM: Message edited by: Aelia Jusa ]

[Lovisa]

The IQ might depend on what age u are, I got 111 and I'm 14. Dunno how old all of ya are but I'm pleased with what I got [img]tongue.gif[/img]