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bolido_sentimental  1yr ago (text post)   3348 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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I was curious about the Wonderlic test after seeing it referenced in a comment sometime this week, so I took a look. Is this practice website actually accurate to the content of the test? I found it really quite easy, some trouble with not being familiar with Imperial units and American coinage aside.

24/25, barely made it. It seems like it is very culturally dependent, though I have a hard time imagining anyone born in the USA scoring 10/25.

I got a bit annoyed at

What number comes next in the series, 31, 1031, 402, 16, ____?

which I ended up spending over a minute on (and still got wrong, though found the answer online).

Agree on both (had trouble with the America-centric questions, or with terminology I hadn’t seen before), yet that’s what’s being advertised - 20/50 is supposed to be roughly IQ = 100, and apparently there was a published thing in the 1980s which showed average scores for NFL players by position (ranging from 16 to 26). Other sites show averages for other professions, though unsourced; apparently nurses average 23 and chemists 31?

Just seems very low to me.

With 4 multiple choice answers, the expected result from random guessing would be 12.5. Get 10 answers right, randomly guess on the rest, and you're average.

I figure the time constraint is what kills people's points, but if you know that will be the limiting factor up front, you could just say make sure you stick to 10 seconds per question, guess on ones you don't know, and... almost certainly get above average? It's quite easy to game.

Alternatively, maybe these questions are easier than the actual test, or the knowledge it's testing is more widely known today than it was originally.

Scores of 10 or below in the wonderlic test are counted as ‘functionally illiterate’ rather than ‘low IQ’ for that reason.

This was the 25-question short version though, so I'd expect 10/25 to very roughly correspond to 20/50, with a significantly increased measurement error. 20/50 is supposed to be average.

Also crazy: the entire Jordan v. New London case was because a police department automatically rejected people for getting 28/50 or higher because they were too smart.

Ah, my mistake there then.

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