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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2534 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 18, 2025

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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.)

According to this very reliable test which leads with

WARNING: Every on-line IQ test is bad While a lot of working has been put into making sure this has good measurement properties, it is not a replacement for a real IQ test. Not on-line test is. A main reason is that no one in the on-line context has the attention span for a reliable assessment.

I get

Full Scale IQ: 153.
Memory IQ: 145 (VM: 81 / 85, EM: 23 / 26)
Verbal IQ: 154 (V: 31 / 34, A: 26 / 27)
Spatial IQ 141 (MR: 17 / 17, CP: 14 / 18)

Apparently I'm a wordcel.

I don't find these results particularly plausible - SAT and GRE scores give me an estimate almost 1 sigma lower, and I'm more inclined to trust those. Still, this felt more like an intelligence test than Raven's Progressive Bitwise Operator Familiarity Test.

The center point one was interesting, and I struggled to find a physical analogue for the question (minimizing the sum of euclidean distances, which is not the same as finding the average point or the same as attaching a spring from a mass to each point and minimizing tension). Which I suppose reinforces my wordceldom.

I got a similar score and have a similar ~1sigma lower estimate from correlated tests (although memory was my best individual score). At first I thought the whole test was just a bit biased towards higher scores as multiple posters got scores in 140-150 range, but there are a few lower scores so not sure

For verbal I think it might be "I used to play a lot of Scrabble which trivialized the anagram task". I'd like to say my scores on the other tasks seem accurate except that for things like mental rotation I definitely struggle in real-world contexts (e.g. getting all the vector math right in a ray tracer) and yet I (and everyone else here who posted a score on that section) got a perfect score.

Huh, odd, the percentiles seemed fine for me as compared with standardized tests like the SAT, and you're one of the people on this board who feel a bit smarter than me.

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