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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2815 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 18, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anybody down to take an online IQ test? It's not timed but according to the site takes up to 20 minutes to complete.

Feel free to share your scores. I'll go first.

Full Scale: 138

Memory: 136

Verbal: 137

Spatial: 141

I'm not surprised my memory was the lowest of the three, I feel like I've always had a bad memory (and I hate that card game called Memory where you flip over the cards to make pairs.) I always wonder if the synonym thing is really the best way to measure verbal intelligence: I just don't care to memorize obscure words which I feel drags my score down but it just seems like a waste of time to remember words that I never encounter and can simply look up the other 99 percent of the time that I'm not taking an online IQ test. Besides that, if I can imagine that a word means something else, that isn't really valued in this test either, but it would be useful if I was writing poetry or a song or something. (Like if the word is "big" and a syononym option is "ebullient," I know that ebullient doesn't mean big but spiritually, to me, it has the essence of bigness...) But I guess the intelligence to override my imagination is what the test measures. I'd rather be imaginative than book smart though, really. The spatial portion was probably the closest to measuring "imagination" in that you need to imagine the shapes rotated in your mind. I feel like I used to be much faster at this, I found myself rechecking my answers quite a few times (of course the test was untimed so I could do that without penalty.)

Full Scale: 143
Memory: 144
Verbal: 135
Spatial: 144

This is close to the score I typically get on the "obvious crap" "IQ tests" that are commonly encountered on the internet, so I'm not in a hurry to apply for Mensa yet.

Spoilers for the test methodology.

I expected my verbal score to be lower than others since English is my second language (a common gripe about intelligence tests). Slightly surprised by a high score in memory because the harder ones felt like I could barely recall 25% of the pictures I've seen with confidence. For shape rotation, imagining them as two shapes joined together in a certain way made it a lot easier.

They say their scores are normalized based on the slice of the population that takes tests. I wonder what's the real distribution of people who took this specific test w.r.t. their scores.

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