> I.e. if you have solved a lot of "guess the next shape" or "find the odd element" you are probably going to perform better because you know how the thing work.
I hear this repeated a lot. I happen to have worked with someone who was into this (former something in Mensa), and as far as I understood one of the hallmarks of a good IQ test is when previous experience have small influence on the testscore.
Some people tend to say that anyone can train for this. I guess if that was true, Mensa would have a lot more members.
Once in the distant, distant past, I had a contract job. Full-time, they paid me for 40 hours a week, but usually I'd have an hour or two of down time each day. Like, 2pm rolls around, and I've actually finished everything that needed to be done for the schedule, so hey, I've got some time.
I started taking online IQ tests. I looked around for the really hard ones, and found that they fall into a couple of categories. Some focused on obscure vocabulary, featuring lists of hundreds of words that I, a native speaker with a pretty good vocabulary, had never seen. Others tested spatial awareness, logic, whatever.
What I discovered, after taking a few of these tests (I skipped the vocab ones; what's the point of learnin' fancy words no one else knows?), is that you get better at them, and fast. I only took maybe 2 or 3 a day, a couple times a week, but it didn't take more than a week to start testing a lot higher.
It got kinda boring once I started seeing that kind of improvement, so I stopped. I'm curious what it'd be like to try again, though.
Clinical IQ tests are administered by psychologists and created by publishers. Pearsons WISC-IV Basic Kit costs $1,123.40.
It's a bit like brand-name drugs and generics, except that the generics aren't allowed to copy the exact chemical structure of the brand name drug in a similar way that research substances copy controlled substances with minor chemical alterations, with unknown effects.
Now these free online IQ tests could create their own IQ test, but that requires both expertise in creating IQ tests, and a large normative sample (WISC used a normative sample of 2,200 children between 6 and 16).
Furthermore, creating more accurate IQ tests does nothing for their bottom line, or may even hurt it as some of these tests are biased to give you higher scores, so that you may share them on social media.
Whilst you could invest in creating an accurate IQ test to be cheaply taken online, you'd have to fight the perception these less accurate tests have created that online IQ tests are about as accurate as horoscopes.
As an interesting note, pearson does offer computer based IQ tests under their Q interactive brand, however, they are not cheap.
>I guess if that was true, Mensa would have a lot more members.
Being in Mensa doesn't really "get" you anything, so there's little incentive to train for an IQ test in the same way there are to use the same amount of time to train for other more materially valuable things, like a license or a skill.
Even if you have a number that they would accept you for, that doesn't even mean you would want to be in a back-patting social group.
1) it is uncontroversial that training improves performance on traditional IQ tests. It is true that people aim to minimise this when designing tests. It is also true that so far, nobody has done a great job at that. It's worth noting that Mensa presents different tests in different parts of the world - which is a pretty big hint that they think previous experience/cultural background affects how you perform on the test.
2) Anyone can improve their running performance through training. Not everyone can be a world class marathon runner. The fact that you can improve your performance on an IQ test is not disproven by the claim that not everyone is capable of reaching Mensa levels on it.
I have no opinion on what you were "out to" do, I was responding to your comment which seemed to be expressing disbelief in the idea that IQ tests can be trained for ("I hear this repeated a lot...I guess if that was true Mensa would have a lot more members")
Thanks for a good answer. Sorry to have been unclear.
My point was that to me it seems clear that IQ tests do measure something outside of previous exposure or training.
IIRC most people will not manage to get 125 (just a number) on a well-designed test even if they are allowed to prepare with the exact same type of questions or even get trained for them.
I personally have no interest in joining Mensa, whether I'm qualified or not. I have no idea how many people generally would like to join, but my impression is that not everybody wants to.
I view intelligence as like this: in training camps for professional American football, prospective players perform physical tests: 40 yard dash, bench press reps, etc., and scouts for pro teams take note, because the results of those tests are correlated with actual professional performance. However, sometimes the guy that had no impressive stats becomes a stand out player, and sometimes the guy with amazing stats never amounts to much. Richard Feynman had an IQ of 125. JD Salinger had an IQ of slightly above average, and the guy with the highest recorded IQ worked as a bouncer for 20 years and hasn't accomplished anything intellectually ground breaking or significant in life.
Maybe cognitive tests have some correlation with what psychometricians call 'g,' general intelligence, but you're either naive, conceited, misinformed, or just plain stupid to think IQ is a meaningful number within the scope of an individual. Judging someone's intelligence is probably more complex than someone's athletic ability, and it's already not hard to see how ridiculous we're becoming when we ask: who is the best athlete: Usain Bolt or Peyton Manning? It is nothing more than a trait of the human mind that as a product of us defining important concepts such as athleticism and intelligence, we then, of course, desire to place ordinal ranking to answer the next obvious question: what is the most athletic, the most intelligence -- it is in an attempt of the human mind's desire to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of ourselves and the people around us; it is not done to understand reality.
Likely mismeasured. He won the Putnam mathematics competition with a stunning margin without preparation. He reportedly had the highest scores ever on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. Both of these are reliable indicators of an IQ above 145, probably by a good bit. (And this is if you ignore the dozens/hundreds of theoretical physics professors who thought of him as the fastest thinker among them, and one of the deepest.)
Well, when we get obvious deviations between IQ and g (the thing IQ is stated in the academic literature as what it's trying to measure) some will say that the IQ test was administered incorrectly. Some will say that IQ tests aren't perfect.
IQ tests are probably both not perfect and administered incorrectly (often enough).
I think it's an almost meaningless number unless we're talking about very large groups of individuals, and there's a lot of evidence and theory to support that.
> I guess if that was true, Mensa would have a lot more members.
Mensa accepts a number of tests which are somewhat correlated with IQ but not traditional IQ tests, and for which there is significant research showing training benefits (including a number of the standardized college, graduate, and professional school entrance exams.)
Or in text form, I think your assuming that smart people want to put in the effort required to join Mensa...when in reality it would be filled with mostly insecure people who feel they have something to prove.
I hear this repeated a lot. I happen to have worked with someone who was into this (former something in Mensa), and as far as I understood one of the hallmarks of a good IQ test is when previous experience have small influence on the testscore.
Some people tend to say that anyone can train for this. I guess if that was true, Mensa would have a lot more members.