I've taken a real life IQ test

[L233]

Why is it doubtful that I scored 60?
I'm relatively retarded.

We know you're a retard but nowhere near as retarded as an IQ of 60 would suggest.

IIRC the IQ calculation is: 100 * Mental Age / Physical Age.

You're 21 years old, if your profile is correct. If you had an IQ of 60 you would have the mental age of an _average_ 12 year old.

 

[pcchen]

IIRC the IQ calculation is: 100 * Mental Age / Physical Age.

I think this definition is quite amusing because I don't think people are getting much smarter after a certain age (Is a 60 years old generally twice as smart as a 30 years old?)
Futhermore, some people (in their 2x years) with probably 60 IQ I've met are not as brilliant as a 12 years old.

 

[arjan de lumens]

I think this definition is quite amusing because I don't think people are getting much smarter after a certain age (Is a 60 years old generally twice as smart as a 30 years old?)
Futhermore, some people (in their 2x years) with probably 60 IQ I've met are not as brilliant as a 12 years old.

IIRC, intelligence is normally considered to peak around an age of 15 to 18 years and then decline slowly after that; any increase in "smartness" after that age is considered to be mainly due to mental exercise and accumulation of knowledge/experience.

 

[ByteMe]

IIRC, intelligence is normally considered to peak around an age of 15 to 18 years and then decline slowly after that; any increase in "smartness" after that age is considered to be mainly due to mental exercise and accumulation of knowledge/experience.

So it is true that I was smarter than my parents.

 

[KimB]

About 15 years ago I did two years of Psycology at university, so some of what Im about to say might be wrong due to my lack of memory, but I think:

IQ tests by definition have to be done to groups of people of similar background/scociety (such as a group of 100 first year students all from the same country). The results are then scaled to make 100 the average, and 180 the highest. Im pretty sure about the 180 thing, but it was a long time ago.

Each IQ test has to be statisticly significant to be a real IQ test. If you only test 1 person, then its rubbish, if you only test 20 people its probably rubbish.

There was some ratio of types of questions. Something like 20% logic, 20% math, 20% word, 20% spacial etc. I cant remember the %ages now.

Your IQ should never change over your lifetime, as the test should be taken with a group of your peers, so if you learn more logic, so do your peers, and the scaling will bring you back to the same score.

I'd just like to state that there's one major factor that you can never remove, no matter how careful you are about the test: test-taking strategy. The strategy with which one approaches an exam can have a tremendous impact upon the results. As can such things as how comfortable one is when taking the exam, how tired the person is at the time, etc.

Personally, I don't think exams are a good thing in general. Of course, at some point we really have to attempt to evaluate people, but one should never put too much stock in any sort of exam.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

I think some people would agree to that.

[...]have the mental age of an _average_ 12 year old.

 

[IgnorancePersonified]

I always thought assessment was a waste of time since it benefits the swats and twats and their ability to spend more hours on an assessment item whereas raw understanding is better evaluated with a sit down exam. Both matter but the trend seems to be leaning more towards assessment items. I think this reflects more an industry desire to get numbers that show a persons ability to perform over the year or over a period of time. Maybe just the case in Oz.

 

[KimB]

I always thought assessment was a waste of time since it benefits the swats and twats and their ability to spend more hours on an assessment item whereas raw understanding is better evaluated with a sit down exam. Both matter but the trend seems to be leaning more towards assessment items. I think this reflects more an industry desire to get numbers that show a persons ability to perform over the year or over a period of time. Maybe just the case in Oz.

Understanding is not well-evaluated with a sit down exam, though. I mean, it is possible for some people to show their understanding of a subject adequately during an exam, but not all. Some times people don't understand the wording of the person who wrote the exam. Sometimes people are just overly-nervous at exam time (I've met some quite intelligent people who had exam anxiety issues that affected their performance). Sometimes people just don't have good strategies in terms of taking the exam, or studying beforehand.

And if you're good enough at taking exams, it's sometimes quite possible to bullshit your way through some of them without having much of any understanding of the subject at all (I've done this: one stark example that stands out in my mind was when I got a B+ on an exam for an anthropology course in which I attended half of the classes, and did none of the homework).

 

[IgnorancePersonified]

So have I(bullshitting) but that also shows aptitude and and a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter, even a competency of the topic however any competent exam and marker 'should' pick it up and sort the wheat from the chaff. Depends on the nature of the exam as well - multiple choice, short/long answer etc or a mix of all. I like the level playing field - here's some questions, you all have 3 hours and your brain + knowledge (no outside resources) - go for it!

How about cut and pasting an assessment item into an assignment? Was prolific in my time but now has reached epidemic proportions from what I hear. I saw an article where a school at a uni cut and pasted key phrases and sentences from submitted papers into google and found a considerable percentage of them were fraudulent. That's harder to pick up. Actually there probably is a market for software that automates that type of search or compares sentences phrases amongst submitted papers.

On the other hand - students that have to work for a living and attend courses have less time for non-attendance assignment items and are then at a disadvantage in this type of marking. I know of guys that had young families at uni and worked multiple part time jobs. I think some of them were actually more focused by there responsibilities and did well because of this but the guy in mummies car living at his oldies + pocket money can allocate a lot more time and consequently has an advantage. Maybe that's 'too bad - so sad' but the same applies to the people that are so nervous in exams they can't apply there knowledge. I would hate to seem them in a real pressure situation!

Personally I think exams should be randomly sprung on the students... Hard to keep a secret and you have the problem of absentee's on the day but you get sudden illnesses and family emergencies in EOY exams anyway. Then there's no cramming - no nervous sleepless pre exam nights.

I don't know - I only do Microsoft exams at the moment and look how good they are

 

[KimB]

So have I(bullshitting) but that also shows aptitude and and a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter,

Actually, in my case it was merely knowledge about the teacher (she was exceedingly liberal).

Maybe that's 'too bad - so sad' but the same applies to the people that are so nervous in exams they can't apply there knowledge. I would hate to seem them in a real pressure situation!

Perhaps. But there aren't all that many jobs where acting under pressure is important. And besides, these people may behave entirely differently in a different scenario, depending upon the source of the pressure, or who stands to lose if they fail.

Personally I think exams should be randomly sprung on the students... Hard to keep a secret and you have the problem of absentee's on the day but you get sudden illnesses and family emergencies in EOY exams anyway. Then there's no cramming - no nervous sleepless pre exam nights.

That would help some people. I'd do no differently: I never pay attention to when exams are anyway. But for people with anxiety, it could be much worse. Adequate preparation can really help people who do suffer from it. And then there's the problem with attendance, which would be much, much worse than for a scheduled exam: at least in my field (physics) attendance is often quite lax.

Slightly better, I think, are frequent but short exams (quizzes). This would force people to study pretty much continuously. But, in the long run, there's really no truly good way to ensure fairness in any sort of evaluation, so you do what you can. For school, the important aspect really isn't that the testing is a fair evaluation: it's more that the student learns the material.

For a job, the evaluation is the important part, and that makes things exceedingly hard. I'm sure there's a whole lot of companies who have spent tons of money on finding better ways to evaluate applicants.

 

[IgnorancePersonified]

Here's one scenario where assessment means little. One friend at uni was the most brilliant guy I have met. Did both streams of maths assignments watching tv or over lunch in the same time it took most people to skim them. He stayed on campus at a college. His papers were passed around that college like porno mags - suitably changed but the majority of that college was using his work. They got busted in the end but it's not rare. It was hushed up but what does that say for the final rankings of all students considering iirc it was a 60-40 ratio?

If some one does assignment/assessment work all year then fails at exams(relatively) that really is telling on their understanding of the topic and ability to answer questions on it. Assignment/assessment tasks are pretty well close to the curriculum in my experience. If someone walks in with out submitting the required assignments and then beats the twat why should they(twat) then get better marks? Because they are more dedicated or have more time or can research a topic better or are better at cutting and pasting? The system is flawed where assessment tasks have more weight than exams. I did start by saying this:

I think this reflects more an industry desire to get numbers that show a persons ability to perform over the year or over a period of time

I'd disagree on the pressure bit - not all jobs are like the money market or Aircraft Carrier commander but every one I have had professionally has involved some form or pressure and on the spot decision making. No time for research.

 

[KimB]

Oh, yeah, I've seen that. The undergraduate class of physics students that was two years behind mind was, for some reason, absolutely full of cheaters. There were a few good students who were getting extremely put-out by the whole thing. As a response, the teachers basically just made almost the entire grade tests: it was too much work to attempt to root out the cheaters.

But I'm not really trying to make the point that homework (or assessment, as you call it) is better. I'm trying to say that there's no one single good measure of how smart a person is, or how good they are at a job. Not until you are able to actually see them work. Using scores in tests (whether IQ or otherwise) would only be useful as sort of a thinning tool for reducing the number of applicants to look at. No single score can ever be used to accurately judge which people would be better at the task at hand.