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This feels like those "Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training" Nintendo games where it's not about being smart or training your brain, but just training your skills for

This feels like those "Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training" Nintendo games where it's not about being smart or training your brain, but just training your skills for this particular kind of tests. Just reading a bit about how those tests are constructed (can the patterns be diagonal for example) would give you already an advantage over the same test where you don't have this. If you can train for it, it's not an IQ test, period.

password54321 5y ago
At the very least a Mensa test at a test centre is much different than any test I have found online. But last time I checked you can only increase your score marginally through practice. An 80 IQ person probably couldn't practice to 150.
zzbzq 5y ago
The justification in the literature is that since all types of intelligence are correlated, just testing a relatively neutral one like progressive matrices is a good choice, since it would generalize out to other types of intelligence. The flaw in this is that types of intelligence are correlated on average, they still vary within an individual, so IQ tests may say something about populations of people, but they are a poor assessment of an individual.
t_mann 5y ago
"If you can train for it, it's not an IQ test, period." That's pretty much the opposite of how IQ tests work. You can train for any test, and prepping can definitely increase your score also on real IQ tests. If you want to know your honest score, do just light preparation, if any. If you want an as high score as you can get, then treat it like you'd treat a SAT/GRE/GMAT/... But don't expect any of the benefits that studies might associate with high IQ scores to flow from this exercise. If you train IQ tests, you'll get better at doing IQ tests, that's it. I wouldn't encourage this behaviour. An IQ test is meant to test you on questions that you haven't seen before, anything else is just statistical noise. Influencers who brag about how they "raised their IQ" with this or that technique (or supplements), are similarly mistaken about what those tests can and can't do.

password54321 5y ago

At the very least a Mensa test at a test centre is much different than any test I have found online. But last time I checked you can only increase your score marginally through practice. An 80 IQ person probably couldn't practice to 150.

zzbzq 5y ago

The justification in the literature is that since all types of intelligence are correlated, just testing a relatively neutral one like progressive matrices is a good choice, since it would generalize out to other types of intelligence. The flaw in this is that types of intelligence are correlated on average, they still vary within an individual, so IQ tests may say something about populations of people, but they are a poor assessment of an individual.

t_mann 5y ago

"If you can train for it, it's not an IQ test, period." That's pretty much the opposite of how IQ tests work. You can train for any test, and prepping can definitely increase your score also on real IQ tests. If you want to know your honest score, do just light preparation, if any. If you want an as high score as you can get, then treat it like you'd treat a SAT/GRE/GMAT/... But don't expect any of the benefits that studies might associate with high IQ scores to flow from this exercise. If you train IQ tests, you'll get better at doing IQ tests, that's it. I wouldn't encourage this behaviour. An IQ test is meant to test you on questions that you haven't seen before, anything else is just statistical noise. Influencers who brag about how they "raised their IQ" with this or that technique (or supplements), are similarly mistaken about what those tests can and can't do.