Does anyone know their IQ?

Post Reply New Topic

I think I have to agree with the last.

I know mine, too, and would feel strange posting it, even though I haven't been shy about sharing it when I need to score a point with someone overly arrogant.

I know my AS son's and he does just fine, but I don't feel I can share that for this discussion, either.

These were pretty extension tests my son and I took, mine more than his. I would presume they were accurate. But, as others have noted ... there really is a limit as to what it does for you. There are many types of intelligence, most of which are not measured on that test.

I think resorting to petty name-calling is equally as childish.

Thanks. How did you do on the test?

i did not do the test. i just looked at the question you queried because i was motivated to look at it and solve it to tell you how it is done.

i can not be bothered to do online I.Q tests.

I'd be curious to know how soft ware folk would do on this as psychohist ceiling'd it. I have a hunch that 'code people' would do well.

I'm the type that when I see an unanswerable problem I like to know why I didn't get it. I always think that if someone can do it and I can't, then I reached my limit and wonder if this bottle neck can be improved. ( btw I did get this one.)

To get a balanced score on the test you need 13 correct and I am/was originally at that threshold , but I went back to pick up a +4 total..... ( that was last year btw.)

I'm curious: What I find odd in people is this wide variance in cognitive ability, i.e "that bell shaped curve," and wonder if this solely boils down to motivation. Imagine if a man was in peril and somehow he had to come up with these answers to survive; would the adrenaline create the necessary "G" stuff to bridge the crisis?

Psychometricians say no, it is 'instone.'

It certainly looks like that, and it is in a sense because I believe a persons ( choices) or" interests" are at least somewhat determined by their abilty. Or put in other words: A lack of interest in something would indicate an inability.

I was thinking of the famous Einstein Puzzle, and I did this two hours and the hype indicated that 98% of folk couldn't do it. The implied threshold was IQ 130 ( 98 percentile) and time was correlated with IQ scores: two hours = 130, one hour 135 and so on.....There was one anecdote of a man that did it in about 5 hours time and I recall he was just determined to absolutely solve it. He did it and didn't have that measured IQ of 130.

As was brought out earlier in this thread, it would seem that IQ is solely related to cognition speed or fluid ability. If someone scores 160 on a test(IQ) and another 100; their respective SAT scores would double the other.

Hence the acqiured information is a two fold difference, and this would make gaining future knowledge an easier thing due to the fact that all ideas are related and the more ideas that you have, the more ideas you can catch.

I think this is the nuts and bolts of IQ.

Last edited by Mdyar on 18 Apr 2011, 8:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

I've had 3 IQ tests, all from when I was a teenager, ages 15 - 18. My score was 136.

I think I would do horrible if I took one now. Not as quick as I used to be, much slower recall, much more limited vocabulary, etc. I believe this is due to cognitive issues related to a neurological disease that they are trying to pin point.

It's to be noted that the ceiling on that test is at only about 3.6 standard deviations above the mean, so the fact that I got a ceiling score is consistent with previous IQ tests I've taken. I personally don't think that software engineers would do particularly better on that test than on most tests, but I could be wrong.


Interesting. Given that was supposed to be the hardest question in that section, and given your overall score, I'm guessing extracting functions from numerical examples may be a strong point for you. Personally from previous experience it seems my strong point is in spatial visualization, so for example I found subtest 3, which is 2D spatial analogies, to be relatively easier.

I feel the same way you do with respect to wanting to know how to do the questions I missed. While most peoples' IQ stays stable over most of a lifetime, so does most peoples' strength, and yet we know strength can be improved with training. I think it's likely that most people can improve their IQs as well.


Certainly motivation has something to do with it, especially with untimed tests. However, I don't think adrenaline alone would bridge unlimited gaps. In my experience, improvements in learning how to think accumulate over years.


This is a bit of a tangent, but the way I understand the hype is that supposedly only 2% of the population can do it at all given unlimited time, and that of that 2%, only 1% - that is, 0.02% of the overall population - can do it in one hour. If being able to do the test is driven by IQ, being able to do it at all would represent an IQ of about 130, as you say, but doing it in an hour would correspond to IQ of 153 or so.

The fact that someone could do it in 5 hours without an otherwise scored IQ of 130 may be a case of that person being better at the puzzle than at whatever IQ test he took - or the 98%/2% numbers could be wrong, or the puzzle might not be all that correlated to IQ after all.

An interesting blog post on intelligence

http://autisticaphorisms.blogspot.com/2 ... chive.html

It is a deep-history look at the Flynn effect as an interaction between plastic human brains (which are the same now as they were 10,000 years ago) and our enviroment (which is very different).

In a related post he tackles why some autistic people do so poorly on IQ tests and why some do so well

http://autisticaphorisms.blogspot.com/s ... disability

For anybody interested in intelligence in general and autistic intelligence specifically, this blog is well worth bookmarking.

For the record, I've never taken an IQ test. But back in the day I did take the SATs (college entrance exams, more or less). I did horrifyingly badly on the math portions (I call it dyscalcula) and exceptionally well on the verbal portions, including those logic problems that are constructed verbally. This made for an overall underwhelming score (no, I'm not going to post it) but I got into college anyway perhaps on the strength of the high scores. This makes me think that if my IQ were tested (by a qualified tester, not online) I would have wide subtest scatter that would average out to the middle. I "feel" like the dead center of the bell curve, 100. But that's just a guess. And I'm not going to do the online tests (sorry, swbluto) because I have internal conflicts that would make my score unobjective. Since my daughter scored low on an official test, I suspect I would simultaneously be trying to depress my score so that I could say "look how far I got in life with a low score- she can too!" and increase my score so I could get the ego boost of being officially labled smart while at the same time trying to push these two conflicting motivations away so I could give answers objectively. All in all, I think it;s best if I just continue to ballpark my presumed score as 100.

Ah, but I was thinking of inexperienced 16 year olds that do hit the ceiling. Supposedly this is a measure of g, the universal raw ubiquitous stuff that is independent of experience. They say IQ is set around 5.

What I really do find astonishing is the bell shaped curve going the other way down. The implication is staggering. Imagine half the world's IQ is less than average. We're all human, and it makes me wonder if it is culture that is responsible for this in some way shape or form. But supposedly not as they say your IQ comes in around year 5.

A 5 year old has spent formatively important years in their culture.

That blog author appears unaware of some recent research on the Flynn effect, for example:

http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDo ... et2004.pdf

Basically the Flynn effect appears to have slowed starting in birth years around 1950, and stopped in birth cohorts around 1970, based on data from several industrialized countries. Average IQ scores closely track average heights, which are considered a good measure of general health. What Flynn was probably observing was the effect of improved living conditions in the century or so following the industrial revolution; this suggests that the Flynn effect actually measured a real but temporary improvement in intelligence, and any arguments based on extrapolation of the Flynn effect for significant periods either forward or back are mistaken.