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> Most IQ tests only go up to 145. Anything very close to 145 may mean you "ceilinged the test." In other words, your IQ could be even higher, but the test can'

by imgabe 7y ago

> Most IQ tests only go up to 145. Anything very close to 145 may mean you "ceilinged the test." In other words, your IQ could be even higher, but the test can't measure it beyond that. This has always bothered me about IQ tests. I mean, how smart is the person who comes up with the test? If your IQ is 120, how could you come up with a question that verifies someone's IQ is 180? Maybe the 180 IQ person would have an answer that is different than yours for reasons that you didn't think of.

jlawson 7y ago
Lots of ways. Simple ones: 1. Time. Each test question have 1 minute to answer. The test author took 4 hours to write the question (before having an organization put it through a battery of tests and analyses to validate it). 2. Group effort. Test authors work in big teams; many brains makes for easier insight. 3. Children's IQ is normalized to their age scale; a 7-year-old with IQ 140 isn't cognitively equivalent to a 35-year-ld with such IQ.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
So, when I was involved in this stuff, this was my best understanding: 1. Tests are tools. By themselves, they tell you nothing of real value. They are useful in the hands of a qualified professional. 2. Tests are game-able. They try to keep questions and tests under wraps because studying for the test or memorizing answers invalidates the test results. 3. Bright kids are horrendously hard to assess, especially if they are 2xE. They have trouble giving the canned "correct" answer. This is something my son calls "guess the teacher's password." In other words "what inane thing do I need to parrot word for word to get the teacher off my back." Example from email list discussion: "Who discovered America?" Teacher's password: Columbus. Gifted kid's reply: "I'm not sure. Columbus was trying to find India and thought he had, which is why Native Americans were called Indians. But it wasn't called America until years later when Amerigo Vespucci traveled to the continents now named after him...(blathers on about more history)...um, what was the question?" 4. Only certain tests can be used to assess IQs above 145. They were having trouble developing and validating an updated test for the higher IQs. 5. You basically can't be accurately assessed by someone with a lower IQ. Smart kids are routinely given hell by adults of more average intelligence who interpret their behavior as bad behavior and can't accommodate them.
- MaximumYComb 7y ago
  That answer to the America question is just a student being obnoxious and attempting to show off. They should have enough awareness to know the correct response. In most cases why would you bother trying to accurately gauge a student over 145? A student with an IQ of 145+ has very different educational needs compared to a 100 IQ student. Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155?
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    They should have enough awareness to know the correct response. This was an actual anecdote from a discussion with a parent of the child in question. The child in question was probably between four and seven years old. They were being assessed by a professional one on one, not in a classroom setting. They were neither showing off nor in possession of the social skills you assume they surely had to have. I will add that imposter syndrome is common among adults because it's quite hard to figure out where we stand in relation to other people, so smart adults frequently feel they must be "average" because this is "normal" for them. Children are at substantial disadvantage compared to adults. Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155? Possibly. The standard deviation for IQ tests is just 15 points. More importantly, a test that only goes to 145 cannot distinguish 145 from 180. Both will likely score 145 or close to it.
    - MaximumYComb 7y ago
      The use of the word teacher had me confused, as I'd normally assume a classroom setting for teaching student relationships. I know what these kids go through. I was that kid myself. I know I was very aware that I wasn't "normal". You're correct that in the age range 4-7 a child wouldn't know to give the "expected" answer. It won't be much longer though until that child can use his/her intelligence to work out the expected response. At my school, it wasn't socially acceptable to show intelligence so maybe I learnt to hide it earlier than most. I don't know my IQ. I've had to take tests a few times as an adult for work and every time I land "most likely somewhere in the top 0.1%" according to the psychologists. I don't really feel it matters if my tests show 145 or 160. A large school with 800 kids is only going to have a single child in that range. You can either move that child up some years, or you can give them a customised workload. A child that is 180 IQ is very different from a child that's 145 but the approach of attempting to find them an appropiate workload would be a good start.
dahart 7y ago
IQ tests are timed. IQ test questions aren’t something that normal people can’t comprehend, they’re just hard to do quickly. It’s easy to ask hard questions without being that smart, just like it’s easy to time the winner of a sprint even if the winner can run faster than you.
bjoli 7y ago
Because IQ tests are standardised rigorous tests. 145 are three effin standard deviations up, where 130 means 99th percentile. 145 is 99.9. There simply are not enough people up there to make reliable tests. WAIS (the most used one) breaks down around 135.
rjf72 7y ago
This isn't how IQ tests work. IQ test results are measured relative to a population. In particular 100 is the mean with a standard deviation of 15. So if you score 115 on an IQ test it doesn't mean anything in a vacuum. It means that relative to the population who took the test you scored better than ~84% of people. An IQ of 130 means you scored better than ~98% of people, and so on. This is what led to the Flynn Effect [1]. It was the initially extremely surprising observation that raw IQ scores over time were increasing. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1970 was actually scoring substantially higher than somebody who scored a 100 just a few decades prior. Not so fun fact: starting sometime around the mid nineties, raw IQ scores started declining, at a substantial rate, in many and potentially all developed nations. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1995 is scoring worse than somebody who scored 100 in 1975. The reason for this is unknown and controversial (as all things even potentially genetic nowadays), but the effect persists even when controlling for things such as immigration. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

by imgabe 7y ago

jlawson 7y ago

Lots of ways. Simple ones: 1. Time. Each test question have 1 minute to answer. The test author took 4 hours to write the question (before having an organization put it through a battery of tests and analyses to validate it). 2. Group effort. Test authors work in big teams; many brains makes for easier insight. 3. Children's IQ is normalized to their age scale; a 7-year-old with IQ 140 isn't cognitively equivalent to a 35-year-ld with such IQ.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

So, when I was involved in this stuff, this was my best understanding: 1. Tests are tools. By themselves, they tell you nothing of real value. They are useful in the hands of a qualified professional. 2. Tests are game-able. They try to keep questions and tests under wraps because studying for the test or memorizing answers invalidates the test results. 3. Bright kids are horrendously hard to assess, especially if they are 2xE. They have trouble giving the canned "correct" answer. This is something my son calls "guess the teacher's password." In other words "what inane thing do I need to parrot word for word to get the teacher off my back." Example from email list discussion: "Who discovered America?" Teacher's password: Columbus. Gifted kid's reply: "I'm not sure. Columbus was trying to find India and thought he had, which is why Native Americans were called Indians. But it wasn't called America until years later when Amerigo Vespucci traveled to the continents now named after him...(blathers on about more history)...um, what was the question?" 4. Only certain tests can be used to assess IQs above 145. They were having trouble developing and validating an updated test for the higher IQs. 5. You basically can't be accurately assessed by someone with a lower IQ. Smart kids are routinely given hell by adults of more average intelligence who interpret their behavior as bad behavior and can't accommodate them.

MaximumYComb 7y ago
That answer to the America question is just a student being obnoxious and attempting to show off. They should have enough awareness to know the correct response. In most cases why would you bother trying to accurately gauge a student over 145? A student with an IQ of 145+ has very different educational needs compared to a 100 IQ student. Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155?
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  They should have enough awareness to know the correct response. This was an actual anecdote from a discussion with a parent of the child in question. The child in question was probably between four and seven years old. They were being assessed by a professional one on one, not in a classroom setting. They were neither showing off nor in possession of the social skills you assume they surely had to have. I will add that imposter syndrome is common among adults because it's quite hard to figure out where we stand in relation to other people, so smart adults frequently feel they must be "average" because this is "normal" for them. Children are at substantial disadvantage compared to adults. Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155? Possibly. The standard deviation for IQ tests is just 15 points. More importantly, a test that only goes to 145 cannot distinguish 145 from 180. Both will likely score 145 or close to it.
  - MaximumYComb 7y ago
    The use of the word teacher had me confused, as I'd normally assume a classroom setting for teaching student relationships. I know what these kids go through. I was that kid myself. I know I was very aware that I wasn't "normal". You're correct that in the age range 4-7 a child wouldn't know to give the "expected" answer. It won't be much longer though until that child can use his/her intelligence to work out the expected response. At my school, it wasn't socially acceptable to show intelligence so maybe I learnt to hide it earlier than most. I don't know my IQ. I've had to take tests a few times as an adult for work and every time I land "most likely somewhere in the top 0.1%" according to the psychologists. I don't really feel it matters if my tests show 145 or 160. A large school with 800 kids is only going to have a single child in that range. You can either move that child up some years, or you can give them a customised workload. A child that is 180 IQ is very different from a child that's 145 but the approach of attempting to find them an appropiate workload would be a good start.

dahart 7y ago

IQ tests are timed. IQ test questions aren’t something that normal people can’t comprehend, they’re just hard to do quickly. It’s easy to ask hard questions without being that smart, just like it’s easy to time the winner of a sprint even if the winner can run faster than you.

bjoli 7y ago

Because IQ tests are standardised rigorous tests. 145 are three effin standard deviations up, where 130 means 99th percentile. 145 is 99.9. There simply are not enough people up there to make reliable tests. WAIS (the most used one) breaks down around 135.

rjf72 7y ago

This isn't how IQ tests work. IQ test results are measured relative to a population. In particular 100 is the mean with a standard deviation of 15. So if you score 115 on an IQ test it doesn't mean anything in a vacuum. It means that relative to the population who took the test you scored better than ~84% of people. An IQ of 130 means you scored better than ~98% of people, and so on. This is what led to the Flynn Effect [1]. It was the initially extremely surprising observation that raw IQ scores over time were increasing. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1970 was actually scoring substantially higher than somebody who scored a 100 just a few decades prior. Not so fun fact: starting sometime around the mid nineties, raw IQ scores started declining, at a substantial rate, in many and potentially all developed nations. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1995 is scoring worse than somebody who scored 100 in 1975. The reason for this is unknown and controversial (as all things even potentially genetic nowadays), but the effect persists even when controlling for things such as immigration. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect