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I downloaded an IQ test application in my cellphone just for fun. My result was 133 (deviation 15). I researched a bit and it turned out that the test used in this application is one of the official tests designed by Mensa (I found the same test online), but I didn't know about the 40min time limit for finishing the 39 exercises, as the android application don't have this time restriction and said nothing about it. I don't know exactly how long it took to me to finish it, but I think it was less than an hour (I spent most of the time in the last 4). I want to know if this time restriction is very important for the scoring, as I'm kind of surprised with my result. Also I can't make the same test again because I'll remember some of the exercises so it will take me less time to do it. Anyone knows another good test so I can get a proper and valid result for re-checking the one I obtained? The one I did is this: http://www.iqtest.dk/main.swf

I didn't make this post for presuming, also I'm kind of skeptical about this... As far as I know 133 is really high, and too much for me considering what I think my real intelligence level is, so the time restriction must be very important for the test even when I think it didn't took me much more than 40min. But I'm considering also that without knowing about a time limit, I made it with no hurry and very relaxed, so maybe I can get a similar score anyway with another tests.

But if I'm really 133, then I think some people in this forums must be around 200  ;D

If someone here took some of this tests and wants to share their results, I'm curious...  :D

An IQ test is only a "test" and not a "measurement". The resulting "point score" is a unitless number, i.e. it does not track any quantity, but is a statistical comparison to a(n idealized) "representative" sample of humanity.

That means:

- the time limit is important, because it was in effect when the reference scores were sampled

- the score of one person can vary fairly widely across different IQ tests, because each test covers only part of the breadth of human mental ability

- repetition of the same test does indeed skew the statistics so far as to make the results useless


I cannot really answer you actual question if you should believe your scores. But I can tell you that is it fairly common for intelligent people to underestimate themselves. This has to do with the fact that intelligence doesn't just mean that you are aware of and can process more information. It also means that you are more aware of the limits of your knowledge and skills. You might want to google for "Dunning-Kruger effect" for a fascinating journey to the psychological limits of human knowledge.


Additionally, the ability to be critical of oneself (i.e. to recognize the flaws in one's own work) occurs more often in gifted people. Or rather the other way round: when you are good at realizing your mistakes, you have much more of a chance to learn from these errors. And so an intelligent and self critical person will tend to learn faster and learn more and discover more new knowledge, and might ultimately produce more interesting results. It's not that good for your happiness, though, to always see your failures more clearly than your successes ...

It may be fairly accurate Kali I got 112 and that is about what I remember testing at years ago. Your mind is wired for these pattern matching and rotation skills.

The Dunning–Kruger effect. Though it is usually expressed as the corollary due to the greater negative impact and potential humor value.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

Afaik it is important for scoring. For ordinary humans, it isn't possible to solve everything in time - that's part of the test.
Additionally a serious IQ test should consist of different sections (practical, linguistic, math etc).
I woudn't take this too serious. A wise man oce said, the IQ measures the ability, to solve an IQ test...  :dink:

  Just remember, subtract 20 points from your score if you buy the detailed analysis of the testing results.

Sorry to nitpick logic terminology here but that's not what a corollary is ;)

@Kali, who here should have the 200 (SD 15) IQ? I didn't see William Sidis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis) posting in here... ;)

Well, many thanks for the info and comments. I also refuse the idea of something such complex as our brains and intelligence to be measured by 39 pattern-recognition exercises. Maybe is just a way for evaluating raw potential capabilities, trying to leave out of the calculation the previous knowledge or specialization on any area of the test subject.
I've read something about multiple types of intelligence, and maybe I'm wired for solving this kind of pattern matching as eiffie said, but I can say that I'm not really that good using my alleged intelligence in many aspects of my life... but ok, maybe this could be something related more to my psyche than my IQ  :D.

@lycium: ok, but you can't deny there are some pretty brilliant minds in here. I don't want to mention anyone because the ones not mentioned could feel bad  ;D.
But I can say that if eiffie got only 112, something must be wrong with this IQ tests ;D

An IQ test indeed highly depends on the sample of people it's normed on. As such, the higher (or more generally, the more distant from IQ100) the result is, the less accurate it is.
Furthermore, IQ tests are very weak proxys of intelligence, focusing way too much on analytical procedures.
Also, if you're doing a test in a language that isn't native to you, you'll automatically be scored worse.

Mostly (not always), IQ tests test how well you generally do at a typical school, which, if you think about it, hardly represents true intelligence. Lots of people you might call geniuses did rather bad at school.

The more recent you get with research, the more often you'll find results that suggest, that IQ tests are pretty much meaningless and don't test for the core factors behind those tests.

To answer your question, though: The timing of an IQ test is extremely important. Depending on the test and time, just a single sneeze might cost you 4 IQ points for being left with less time.

I have done various IQ tests with varying results before. IIRC I always was in the range between 120 and 165. (165 was the highest I've got on one).
The sheer variation between those tests suggests that they are uncomparable. If you really want to compare your IQ to someone else's, you'll have to do so under precisely the same conditions, with the same test, the same timing and with both being equally awake. The latest one is pretty much impossible to get right but can have severe effects on the score.

This is the only claim about IQ tests that can be made with certainty. :)


Another fun fact: the scale for IQ test results is not consistently normalized. Sure, 100 is always the average. But some tests value one standard deviation out as 110 points, while others value the same "raw" result as 115 points. So the same number 130 can mean either two or three standard deviations from the mean. And the difference between those two points on a gaussian probability distribution is ... huge. The air quickly gets thin up there.

Extreme abilities in an isolated small skill set are not all that uncommon. So as I wrote earlier, depending on the type of test, scores can vary a lot. If the test only exercises the few genius parts of your brain, you'll score very high, even if all your other mental skills are closer to average.

And lastly, IQ tests do not convey any information about the style, the quality of one's thinking. The most important part in my not so humble opinion is intuition and creativity. A well educated quick thinker may be able to, say, solve a large number of mathematical computations with brute force at breathtaking speed. But a more ingenious mind might recognize a geometrical pattern in those formulas, and intuitively grasp that the solution has some meaning as a distinctive shape. An IQ test cannot distinguish between those two hypothetical people. (And let's not even get into issues of motivation, i.e. why we do what we do, regardless of whether we are "naturally" good at it.)

Some of the tests I tried so far, I did together with others, back in school.
Usually people say, you top out intelligence at ~26. There is a lot of debate on that value though.
Either way, as said, back then I was in school. And not a single one of my classmates scored below 110 on either of those tests. The scores varied between 110 and 170.
Now have a random selection of 20 people and take their IQs. How likely is it that not a single one of them turns out to be below average? How likely is it, that every single one is above average? Both clearly indicate that the "100", those tests were normalized to, are not *actually* the population-wide average.

A quick probability proxy would be having a coin land on heads 20 times in a row, about one in a million.
And I can assure you that

• some of my class mates weren't the brightest
• our class was not a class in a million.

Furthermore, imagining that, what was the age back then, 13-14?-year-olds already have IQs up to 170... What would those end up getting when "on their high point"? 200+?

Clearly, if you want a "true" IQ test that actually might have something like a vague distant meaning, you'll need to go to some sort of specialist / psychologist. And even then, IQ tests are rather useless.

To some extend, I'd even say they're dangerous, since they assign a number to you that doesn't have a true meaning but is perceived to be marking you as genious or retarded, giving rise to a lot of prejudice and wrong expectations.

Please describe which scale you are using - the US appears to use a system where 170 represents "genius" level, but the system in the UK uses 130 (or maybe 135?) - of course I think they are equivalent but with different difficulty/scoring.

I'm apparently UK 132-136 for anyone interested - based on the public tests done a couple of years ago by the Beeb (which covered all the "usual" IQ question types) - the largest result made public of anyone who took part was 146 I think.
My brother (and his wife) are Mensa members - that's how they met I think !!
Also I have mild Asperger's (now considered low level Autism) which is apparently relatively common with higher IQs - though (IMO) I'm nowhere near as bad as Sheldon but worse than Leonard ;)
Unfortunately in my case I'm severely lacking in formal academic education since I've never completed anything beyond UK "A" levels and I've been trying to make time to get up to speed on Degree-level fractal related math but to be honest something always gets in the way.
A couple of years ago I asked my brother to get me a degree-level math text book relating to fractals and he got me "Chaos, Dynamics and Fractals: an algorithmic approach to deterministic chaos" by J.L.McCauley (Cambridge press) - it might as well be Greek, I don't even know the mathematical syntax used in the first few pages for certain.

Unfortunately my brother can't help - he's in Mensa but he didn't do Maths even to "A" level.

IQ tests are irrelevant, they're more or less completely meaningless.  :tongue1:
Ability to quickly solve little pattern recognition tasks is nothing to do with intelligence (whatever that is anyway), which is why no academic institutions use them, nor do any research industries give them any credit. Einstein most probably would have had a lower score than Sylvester Stallone.
The only group that thinks IQ tests are valid are MENSA, but they would since it is self-serving.

who knows

All i know was 35 years or so back when i was young( pre-teen) they said i was 165
now that was before the drugs and booze -- man i liked that needle
and 35 or so years back so who knows now
and the tests HAVE changed

PS. the mensa challenge was very easy ,but that was when i was 17

It's not only about multiple intelligences. Probably IQ is used, becouse in certain jobs it helps to get rid of dumb :hurt:.

Well IQ tests alsou are culturaly biased. Englishman after reading the task intuatively  would understand what is asked. Russian at first would need to think, what is asked to do. And only then do the task. So he will have lower IQ score.
I have few indian friend with good english, but sometimes I need to think a lot, what he realy meant. Same words in different cultures can have different meanings. In darkest racist corners of internets (like wikipedia) informs that chinese are exeptionaly good at IQ tests, but this could reflect that they are more disciplined.

It alsou gives number of your worth.

As said, those tests I (basically my entire class) did back when I was 13-14. I have no clue what ranking system was used. I'm not even sure wether that was even mentioned on the website.
In either case, there simply is no way that not a single person in my class was below average. And I'm not saying they were absolute awesome dudes or something. It's simply that this is statistically pretty much impossible.

IIRC, I once did a Mensa test too and that turned out to be ~140. It's been a while though.
Either way, I don't really consider any of those tests valuable.
They are some sort of educational proxy with maybe a hint of actual underlying intelligence. Nothing more.

I wish more people would actually look at the test rather than complain about what they percieve the test is. It is NOT culturally biased - it is based on the idea that all intelligence arises from the ability to spot rules/patterns. Yes the number is basically meaningless but compared to others who have taken the same test under similar conditions it does give you an idea of what side of stupid you are on :)

i made 113 points in 15 minutes, but clicking the last 10 questions just randomly :D

It is very much culturally biased, for language is part of culture and if you do, say, an IQ test in chinese and don't know a chinese word, you'll obviously fail.

Though there are even less extreme examples: Many IQ tests will include wordplays or sayings and either ask you for a meaning or a completion of those.
Even if you're generally proficient in a language, you're very likely to not know all those rarer sayings if you're not born into a culture that uses them.

Also, if you're grown up in an environment with a lot of pattern-matching-style puzzles, you'll likely outperform others just from experience, especially considering that many such puzzles either stem from IQ tests or are used in them as well. That doesn't technically mean you're better in generic pattern matching. It just means that you're trained on those particular examples of pattern matching.

Same goes with all those tests asking you to work through a simple math problem like finding a hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. Those are barely pattern matching anymore. For many they are routines.

Of course you could design a test that is fair in all regards but even so. A basic IQ test just doesn't adress true intelligence. It's a weak proxy for it, nothing more.

The test kali linked to has only limited explanation before you are shown a series of tiles and asked to select one that fits the pattern - that is as culturally unbiased as it gets. A child can figure out the first questions with NO instruction. This is the kind of test that can be used to compare artificial intelligence to nature's.
And guess what - If you grow up in an environment with a lot of pattern-matching style puzzles - you will be more intelligent! Why do you think we have nursery rhymes and legos?

Are IQ tests weak - yes. So is our understanding of the universe - do we stop trying to quantify it too?

the first "intelligent" answer since quite a while in this thread. ;D

The criticism of IQ tests is not a criticism of science just that the IQ test is not an intelligence quota, it is a fast pattern recognition test. It is about as close to judging intelligence as a sudoku puzzle.

Should we stop trying to quantify intelligence? As a single value I would say yes, perceived intelligence can come from things such as diversity of skills in a population, communication between people, motivation, picking the right problems to solve, 'work'-life balance, ability to explain... etc. It doesn't map to a single value per person, even in principle.  :tongue1:

Just to mention that I did another test, and I got 128 (it took me 35 minutes). But it was culturally biased in this case, because it had a couple of wordplays in english (my first language is spanish) and as I don't have a vast vocabulary knowledge I probably didn't know the words I supposed to form from the letters (it seems I always have an excuse ;D)

Despite the validity of this tests, at least it's fun for me to make them, and I think they are kind of a good exercise for the brain.

Also, maybe doing several tests makes the brain get better for this kind of mental challenges, and someday I'll fool MENSA to make me one of their members...
Just because I want to meet some very smart beautiful blondes... there must be some of them, although they are very rare specimens rofl2

usually i have no problems with the easy patterns, but at the end with all those kinds of test (after 66% )  i really get stuck, and one time i even heard the explanations for them, and i really could not get the logic behind it after hearing the explanation :( :D

But it shows a significant weakness of our treatment of scientific evidence. We tend to mistake them for truth!

We don't "mistake" scientific evidence for truth.
What we do is, that we accept it for truth until it's no longer sufficient.
Basically, we take it as "approximate truth" which is "good enough for now."
And in some cases, like Newtonian mechanics, it's even "good enough" for a wide range of use-cases, namely in scenarios with rather slow speeds, neglectible gravity subtleties and of macroscopic extend.

And we know for a fact that our currently best approximate truth is no longer good enough once we go microscopic and want to consider gravity subtelties. Still, even that limited approximation has brought us a far way. The approximations are well established and very good in a wide range of use-cases.

They are not some random statistical weak proxy that measures something entirely different from what it's supposed ot measure.
(For that matter, they aren't even tools of measuring. Rather they are tools for predicting what's going to be measured)

And don't get me wrong, there are some really good statistical proxies out there, used a lot with great results, despite being mere proxies, giving rise to quite elaborate, yet accurate predictions.
IQ tests simply fail to be useful for predicting quite anything.
At best they predict how successful you have been at school before the tester sees your school certificate.
Not rarely, they don't even do a decent job in explaining that.

This is my biggest problem with IQ tests: Besides maybe being helpful to brag in some circles, they simply don't have a true scientific relevance. They can be abused as status symbol. Nothing more.

Btw, Kali, doing them for fun is fine. I liked doing them as well. - I generally like doing logics puzzles of various kinds.
Just don't expect the value to mean a thing beyond being essentially a grade for how well you did on those specific problems.

That's a matter of attitude. I shared your opinion more than half of my life, so don't think, I don't understand your arguments. In opposite - I'm only sick and tired of them.
The best science ever achieved are partial truthes - not more not less. And science allways fails, when it comes to the bigger correlation. (like IQ Tests demonstrate)
I know I am only a screaming minority - especially amongst mathematicians - and I don't want to kick off that old, boring discussion.
The basics of my point of view are refered in the books of Fritjof Capra, Ilya Prigogine or Hans-Peter Duerr.

I'm not quite sure what you're refering to when saying, "science fails [for] bigger correlations".
I'm especially unsure what "bigger correlations" would even be.
The only thing that comes to mind is works on huge data-sets but that doesn't really describe "big correlations". Working on such data-sets has only recently become reasonably feasible with the rise of cheap fast computers. And even there, a lot of progress is being made all the time.

I don't see how an IQ test would fit in there though.

Could you please elaborate?

just one point: intelligence is what i would call a multifactorial quality. We a) can't describe it precisely and b) can't even guess how many factors have influence on it.
So in first order approximation it fits my definition of a bigger correlation (correlation of higher order is a better term - sorry, I'm not natively english)
The attempt to describe such a complex combination of attributes with a reductionistic approach like the IQ - teared down to one value - is nothing more than ridiculous. I hope even science believers can understand, why I see no truth at all in this.
For the rest I honestly recommend the lecture mentioned in my last post.

Uh, I don't see why we are having this argument at all then.
I agree: Tearing it down to a single value is ridiculous.
There have been some more or less successful attempts in which qualitative words got a quantitative meassure attatched to them. IQ tests clearly are not one of them.

  I don't get how the site scores IQ?  I got  -70 + i66.

woot, you got an complex number iq, congrats, best thing is complex numbers cant be ordered rofl

yep, annother intelligent reply!  rofl2

Hadn't looked this up before, but in case anyone's still interested this is direct from the official UK? Mensa site:

"
As different IQ tests were developed, each was given its own scoring system. Therefore, an IQ of 150 is a meaningless claim unless you know the actual test which was used. In order to compare one IQ test against another, the scores are converted to 'percentiles', i.e. where a person's score falls in comparison to the rest of the population by percentage. Mensa offers membership to anyone whose IQ score places them within the top two per cent of the population, no matter which approved test was used.

A top 2% mark in any of these frequently used tests below qualifies you for entry to Mensa. The minimum test mark to get into Mensa is:

    Cattell III B - 148
    Culture Fair - 132
    Ravens Advanced Matrices - 135
    Ravens Standard Matrices - 131
    Wechsler Scales - 132

On BBC Test The Nation

The BBC Test The Nation IQ quiz is not a recognised IQ test and so Mensa is unable to accept people for membership on the basis of their Test The Nation scores. However, achievement of a score of 120 or more in this IQ quiz would suggest you might like to have a go at a full Mensa IQ test.
"

Might have to do with the imaginary portion of my IQ. 

Is this a meating of Mensa?
(http://new.assets.thequietus.com/images/articles/10000/Laibach_WAT_2003__photo_by_Ici_Skafar_1347389214_crop_550x550.jpg)

It's kind of reminds some sort of neo-Eugenics, especialy after reading wikipedia's article about very flattery but disguasting from morality standpoint book "IQ and Wealth of Nation" and "Race and IQ".

If you want to learn the real, scientific, reasons why some of today's nations are technologically more advanced than others, then you could read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. His chain of reasoning does not resort to hidden racism or any other ideology, other than the unwavering faith in the scientific method. Possibly the most insightful book I have read all my life.

in my twenties my IQ was 155,  then maybe 30 years later, to prove to my kids that i wasnt as stupid as they think, the IQ test gave me 133 (I beat both children). But were the old test and the new test similar, probably not.

Now my point of trivia is, that 155 was carried out in a team building company conference, so there were all types of people there. After we received the results he asked me if i was a draughtsman or an engineer (which i was). He told me my result was not a true IQ as I had an unfair advantage, because most people are not skilled in thinking in 3D for the spacial geometry bits of the test.