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Are IQ tests ever useful for determining something in the real world, something that impacts us? Interviewing for a Swedish fintech, they had me do an online I

Are IQ tests ever useful for determining something in the real world, something that impacts us? Interviewing for a Swedish fintech, they had me do an online IQ test in front of a webcam proctor before they would send me the take home assignment. I passed the IQ test with max score but didn't get the job. What was the point of the IQ test? Why not just send people the take home assignment directly? Surely if they can do the takehome they have a great IQ to begin with. Is the IQ test some Big-tech fetish? A fintech fetish? A Swedish hiring fetish? The lengthy IQ test felt completely shoehorned in the recruiting process and was a massive waste of time, and told my friends to not bother applying for jobs there.

tester756 4y ago
Some say that IQ is the best predictor for work / academic success
- anamexis 4y ago
  [who?]
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    From "Selecting Talent: The Upshot from 85 Years of Research"[1]: > The upshot of this research is that work sample tests (e.g., seeing if people can actually do key elements of a job -- if a secretary can type or a programmer can write code ), general mental ability (IQ and related tests), and structured interviews had the highest validity of all methods examined (Arun, thanks for the corrections). As Arun also suggests, Schmidt and Hunter point out that three combinations of methods that were the most powerful predictors of job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (in other words, hiring someone smart and seeing if they could do the work), GMA plus an integrity test, and GMA plus a structured interview (but note that unstructured interviews, the way they are usually done, are weaker). > Note that this information about combinations is probably more important than the pure rank ordering, as it shows what blend of methods works best, but here is also the rank order of the 19 predictors examined, rank ordered by the validity coefficient, an indicator of how strongly the individual method is linked to performance: > 1. Work sample tests (.54) > 2. GMA tests ..."General mental ability" (.51) > 3. Employment interviews -- structured (.51) > ... This is a summary of the peer reviewed article "The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings."[2] --- [1] https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-talent-the-upshot-from-85-years-of-research.html https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-ta... [2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Then Daniel Goleman arrived and popularized the notion of a number of other qualities as superior predictors ("Emotional Intelligence", "Focus"¹, grit...) [¹Capitalized as they are also book titles]
gotoeleven 4y ago
below a certain level they indicate that you are likely to question the validity of IQ in an internet comment
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  I'd be surprised if there are any studies that show this. Anecdotal evidence: me. Can reliably get high scores in IQ tests. Trained to pass IQ tests as a child. Regularly questions the validity of IQ in internet comments.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Sorry to break the rhetoric, but "Typical(Quality,Group)" is not countered by "i∉G ∧ P(i)" Update: ...Now waiting for the sniper of the day to find the light and express itself. Edit: Oh, I see: you probably wanted me to write "i∉G ∧ Q(i)". But actually it works for any property P: the fact is, the i is not part of the group...
- justizin 4y ago
  IQ has racist and eugenicist origins, not understanding that in 2023 can only be described as willful ignorance.
  - jacobriis 4y ago
    Also known as a hypothesis
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    And? "Promotes(Group,Theory)" does not impact the aletics of the theory. Second logic confusion in this tree...
  - neotrope 4y ago
    > below a certain level they indicate that you are likely to question the validity of IQ in an internet comment found em
- 4y ago
mdp2021 4y ago
> ever useful Surely they reveal some traits. Issue is, they do not reveal other traits which are relevant to the whole "intention".
tomjakubowski 4y ago
Very low IQ is predictive of poorer outcomes in wealth and income. That's about it. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
- treeman79 4y ago
  My wife teaches kindergarten. Children with problems almost always have much lower IQ. 50-70 for the most troublesome. There is a long process of testing to get them help / in a place where they are not injuring themselves, her, and or other students. Not all, but many of the parents in complete denial about the reality of the situation.
dilyevsky 4y ago
It’s possible they actually wanted someone dumb so maybe the test worked as intended
alistairSH 4y ago
In the US, it's possible to be too smart to be a police officer. In Conn, an above average IQ is a disqualifier and that policy has been upheld in the courts. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/
- silisili 4y ago
  When I was younger, I was applying to be a beer delivery driver because honestly, it was pretty good money for where I lived. They gave us something similar to an IQ test - some logic, some reasoning, some general knowledge. Afterwards a guy called me into his office. Said nobody had ever aced this test before, and joked that I should be applying for his job. Told me bluntly they weren't going to hire me, because there's no way I'd stick around long. Guess he would have been right...
- treeman79 4y ago
  High IQ usually means easily bored. Easily bored is bad for boring jobs.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I can't claim a truly incredible IQ, but mine was measured high enough to get me into gifted programs as a kid. I've much preferred the "boring" jobs I've had to the brainy ones, which I mostly find to be miserable. I'm only not doing a "boring" job to this day, because they don't pay half as well as the brainy jobs. Not sure if that's a majority attitude among my peers (or those smarter than me, of whom there are plenty) but given all the other personnel problems low-skill employers put up with, I can't imagine smart-person-boredom would even register. Now, smart people deciding they'd prefer to like work less, but have way more money? Or deciding at a much lower threshold that they don't need to put up with abuse or even illegal behavior (so very, very common) from a manager, and leaving, since they have tons of other options? Those, maybe, would tip the scales. I'm skeptical that boredom is the main problem, though it may be a nicer (to the employer) way to put it.
mediaman 4y ago
Sounds like it was a high pass filter, and that IQ was a necessary but insufficient condition. Or they just had too many applicants. For what it's worth, g-factor is correlated to many different cognitive abilities. A person's individual competency areas are highly correlated to other competency areas. For a job where cognitive ability is relevant, knowing the g-factor is predictive of job performance.
jackmott42 4y ago
IQ tests correlate with many real world outcomes, including: * income * marriage stability * going to prison or not * job performance to name a few The correlation for these things is of course is not 1.0, but its not negligible either. However that isn't really the use, the use is for identifying social/environmental/genetic things that are effecting a populations intelligence. Exactly the sort of thing this article is looking at.
- soared 4y ago
  I don’t know whether it’s true but I’d bet money that parents net worth, avg income, or zip code are even better predictor of those outcomes.
  - mrandish 4y ago
    The problem is that IQ has a large hereditary component so all of the measures will tend to move together.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I don’t know whether it’s true but I’d bet money that parents net worth, avg income, or zip code are even better predictor of those outcomes. IQ correlates with them after controlling for those factors (and parental wealth, at least, does too, controlling for the others and IQ). Not sure if the others explain anything not explained by parental wealth and IQ, but probably a little bit. (But, e.g., zip code will overlap a lot with both wealth and the non-wealth variation in IQ, the latter since geography will predict some environmental issues known to adversely impact IQ.)
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      After controlling for what are probably the most important factors, there's a correlation in something. Is that even meaningful?
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
jstarfish 4y ago
> Are IQ tests ever useful for determining something in the real world, something that impacts us? It's a test of creative problem solving. Anybody who aces one would certainly be a good candidate for a follow-up interview, but the test alone isn't everything. It's possible to be really inventive but underqualified in some other way. I could see this being of particular interest for a financial services firm, where "creative accounting" is the name of the game. > Why not just send people the take home assignment directly? People cheat. The IQ test made the employer feel like they at least know something objective about you enough to merit continuing with your interview.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >It's a test of creative problem solving. I doubt that one showed that. It was just a test of visual shapes/pattern recognition. Could you quickly spot the next recurring shape/pattern from the previous five. How dopes this demonstrate creative problem solving?
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    "Problems" are interpreted as underlying "logics" that may not be evident. As in, "Why is this happening? // Because of this hidden structure/process/mechanism(...) H". Reaching solutions is seen as dependent on deeper understanding.
paws 4y ago
Pretty sure I know which company you're talking about b/c I had the same experience. I read somewhere the IQ test may be a mandate from the CEO. I actually had to take the silly IQ test twice, once on my own and a second time with a webcam proctor who watched me (its as awkward as it sounds). Anyway the proctor told me I got a perfect score, so I next completed the take home, with all three solutions passing the tests (in an optimal way AFAICT). Got rejected anyway. The IQ part felt like a big waste of time for me as well as the proctor. So long as they insist on this silly game I agree to not bother applying there. Every situation is different etc but speaking for myself BNPL seems fundamentally unattractive given how many credit card benefits you'd forego [1] [1] https://www.cardratings.com/financial-literacy/what-is-buy-now-pay-later-and-is-it-better-than-credit-cards.html https://www.cardratings.com/financial-literacy/what-is-buy-n...
unsupp0rted 4y ago
The lower one’s IQ, the more likely they are to agree to an IQ test as an interview condition, instead of walking away. Unless they happen to be intellectually curious about their result, I suppose.
1letterunixname 4y ago
A George Carlin quote would be apropos here. Furthermore, it's worth considering both the cultural biases skewing multiple choice tests and the rebasing of tests to maintain 100 as being the "mean" value. If IQ tests were absolutely sensitive and specific for performance prediction, corporations would find a way to administer them. At best, MBTI personality tests are sometimes included as part of an overall candidate profile. It's an easier signal to use university pedigree such as Ivy or JEE as a proxy for properties, rewarding a type of monocultural groupthink. If you want to see someone highly-motivated, consider a parent with kids and a mortgage on the brink of bankruptcy. They'll pass all sorts of tests and get shit done. People who have been through difficult circumstances tend to be the most capable and highest achieving. Special forces and startups tend to attract a mix of people who grew up poor, semi-abused, and/or semi-homeless and race car drivers/fighter pilot types.

tester756 4y ago

Some say that IQ is the best predictor for work / academic success

anamexis 4y ago
[who?]
- nordsieck 4y ago
  From "Selecting Talent: The Upshot from 85 Years of Research"[1]: > The upshot of this research is that work sample tests (e.g., seeing if people can actually do key elements of a job -- if a secretary can type or a programmer can write code ), general mental ability (IQ and related tests), and structured interviews had the highest validity of all methods examined (Arun, thanks for the corrections). As Arun also suggests, Schmidt and Hunter point out that three combinations of methods that were the most powerful predictors of job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (in other words, hiring someone smart and seeing if they could do the work), GMA plus an integrity test, and GMA plus a structured interview (but note that unstructured interviews, the way they are usually done, are weaker). > Note that this information about combinations is probably more important than the pure rank ordering, as it shows what blend of methods works best, but here is also the rank order of the 19 predictors examined, rank ordered by the validity coefficient, an indicator of how strongly the individual method is linked to performance: > 1. Work sample tests (.54) > 2. GMA tests ..."General mental ability" (.51) > 3. Employment interviews -- structured (.51) > ... This is a summary of the peer reviewed article "The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings."[2] --- [1] https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-talent-the-upshot-from-85-years-of-research.html https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-ta... [2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006
mdp2021 4y ago
Then Daniel Goleman arrived and popularized the notion of a number of other qualities as superior predictors ("Emotional Intelligence", "Focus"¹, grit...) [¹Capitalized as they are also book titles]

gotoeleven 4y ago

below a certain level they indicate that you are likely to question the validity of IQ in an internet comment

wizzwizz4 4y ago
I'd be surprised if there are any studies that show this. Anecdotal evidence: me. Can reliably get high scores in IQ tests. Trained to pass IQ tests as a child. Regularly questions the validity of IQ in internet comments.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Sorry to break the rhetoric, but "Typical(Quality,Group)" is not countered by "i∉G ∧ P(i)" Update: ...Now waiting for the sniper of the day to find the light and express itself. Edit: Oh, I see: you probably wanted me to write "i∉G ∧ Q(i)". But actually it works for any property P: the fact is, the i is not part of the group...
justizin 4y ago
IQ has racist and eugenicist origins, not understanding that in 2023 can only be described as willful ignorance.
- jacobriis 4y ago
  Also known as a hypothesis
- mdp2021 4y ago
  And? "Promotes(Group,Theory)" does not impact the aletics of the theory. Second logic confusion in this tree...
- neotrope 4y ago
  > below a certain level they indicate that you are likely to question the validity of IQ in an internet comment found em
4y ago

mdp2021 4y ago

> ever useful Surely they reveal some traits. Issue is, they do not reveal other traits which are relevant to the whole "intention".

tomjakubowski 4y ago

Very low IQ is predictive of poorer outcomes in wealth and income. That's about it. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

treeman79 4y ago
My wife teaches kindergarten. Children with problems almost always have much lower IQ. 50-70 for the most troublesome. There is a long process of testing to get them help / in a place where they are not injuring themselves, her, and or other students. Not all, but many of the parents in complete denial about the reality of the situation.

dilyevsky 4y ago

It’s possible they actually wanted someone dumb so maybe the test worked as intended

alistairSH 4y ago

In the US, it's possible to be too smart to be a police officer. In Conn, an above average IQ is a disqualifier and that policy has been upheld in the courts. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/

silisili 4y ago
When I was younger, I was applying to be a beer delivery driver because honestly, it was pretty good money for where I lived. They gave us something similar to an IQ test - some logic, some reasoning, some general knowledge. Afterwards a guy called me into his office. Said nobody had ever aced this test before, and joked that I should be applying for his job. Told me bluntly they weren't going to hire me, because there's no way I'd stick around long. Guess he would have been right...
treeman79 4y ago
High IQ usually means easily bored. Easily bored is bad for boring jobs.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I can't claim a truly incredible IQ, but mine was measured high enough to get me into gifted programs as a kid. I've much preferred the "boring" jobs I've had to the brainy ones, which I mostly find to be miserable. I'm only not doing a "boring" job to this day, because they don't pay half as well as the brainy jobs. Not sure if that's a majority attitude among my peers (or those smarter than me, of whom there are plenty) but given all the other personnel problems low-skill employers put up with, I can't imagine smart-person-boredom would even register. Now, smart people deciding they'd prefer to like work less, but have way more money? Or deciding at a much lower threshold that they don't need to put up with abuse or even illegal behavior (so very, very common) from a manager, and leaving, since they have tons of other options? Those, maybe, would tip the scales. I'm skeptical that boredom is the main problem, though it may be a nicer (to the employer) way to put it.

mediaman 4y ago

Sounds like it was a high pass filter, and that IQ was a necessary but insufficient condition. Or they just had too many applicants. For what it's worth, g-factor is correlated to many different cognitive abilities. A person's individual competency areas are highly correlated to other competency areas. For a job where cognitive ability is relevant, knowing the g-factor is predictive of job performance.

jackmott42 4y ago

IQ tests correlate with many real world outcomes, including: * income * marriage stability * going to prison or not * job performance to name a few The correlation for these things is of course is not 1.0, but its not negligible either. However that isn't really the use, the use is for identifying social/environmental/genetic things that are effecting a populations intelligence. Exactly the sort of thing this article is looking at.

soared 4y ago
I don’t know whether it’s true but I’d bet money that parents net worth, avg income, or zip code are even better predictor of those outcomes.
- mrandish 4y ago
  The problem is that IQ has a large hereditary component so all of the measures will tend to move together.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I don’t know whether it’s true but I’d bet money that parents net worth, avg income, or zip code are even better predictor of those outcomes. IQ correlates with them after controlling for those factors (and parental wealth, at least, does too, controlling for the others and IQ). Not sure if the others explain anything not explained by parental wealth and IQ, but probably a little bit. (But, e.g., zip code will overlap a lot with both wealth and the non-wealth variation in IQ, the latter since geography will predict some environmental issues known to adversely impact IQ.)
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    After controlling for what are probably the most important factors, there's a correlation in something. Is that even meaningful?
    - dragonwriter 4y ago

jstarfish 4y ago

> Are IQ tests ever useful for determining something in the real world, something that impacts us? It's a test of creative problem solving. Anybody who aces one would certainly be a good candidate for a follow-up interview, but the test alone isn't everything. It's possible to be really inventive but underqualified in some other way. I could see this being of particular interest for a financial services firm, where "creative accounting" is the name of the game. > Why not just send people the take home assignment directly? People cheat. The IQ test made the employer feel like they at least know something objective about you enough to merit continuing with your interview.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>It's a test of creative problem solving. I doubt that one showed that. It was just a test of visual shapes/pattern recognition. Could you quickly spot the next recurring shape/pattern from the previous five. How dopes this demonstrate creative problem solving?
- mdp2021 4y ago
  "Problems" are interpreted as underlying "logics" that may not be evident. As in, "Why is this happening? // Because of this hidden structure/process/mechanism(...) H". Reaching solutions is seen as dependent on deeper understanding.

paws 4y ago

Pretty sure I know which company you're talking about b/c I had the same experience. I read somewhere the IQ test may be a mandate from the CEO. I actually had to take the silly IQ test twice, once on my own and a second time with a webcam proctor who watched me (its as awkward as it sounds). Anyway the proctor told me I got a perfect score, so I next completed the take home, with all three solutions passing the tests (in an optimal way AFAICT). Got rejected anyway. The IQ part felt like a big waste of time for me as well as the proctor. So long as they insist on this silly game I agree to not bother applying there. Every situation is different etc but speaking for myself BNPL seems fundamentally unattractive given how many credit card benefits you'd forego [1] [1] https://www.cardratings.com/financial-literacy/what-is-buy-now-pay-later-and-is-it-better-than-credit-cards.html https://www.cardratings.com/financial-literacy/what-is-buy-n...

unsupp0rted 4y ago

The lower one’s IQ, the more likely they are to agree to an IQ test as an interview condition, instead of walking away. Unless they happen to be intellectually curious about their result, I suppose.

1letterunixname 4y ago

A George Carlin quote would be apropos here. Furthermore, it's worth considering both the cultural biases skewing multiple choice tests and the rebasing of tests to maintain 100 as being the "mean" value. If IQ tests were absolutely sensitive and specific for performance prediction, corporations would find a way to administer them. At best, MBTI personality tests are sometimes included as part of an overall candidate profile. It's an easier signal to use university pedigree such as Ivy or JEE as a proxy for properties, rewarding a type of monocultural groupthink. If you want to see someone highly-motivated, consider a parent with kids and a mortgage on the brink of bankruptcy. They'll pass all sorts of tests and get shit done. People who have been through difficult circumstances tend to be the most capable and highest achieving. Special forces and startups tend to attract a mix of people who grew up poor, semi-abused, and/or semi-homeless and race car drivers/fighter pilot types.