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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32779 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I just took another batch of IQ tests for some poor suffering undergrads and felt that they were hilariously swingy.

I've always scored around 130; but one or two questions can drop your right out of/into that bracket , and the pattern recognition questions are easy to get wrong through test format. Eg, in this test there was a sequence of numbers displayed such that the question number looked like it was part of the sequence. I only noticed because it made the sequence all fucky.

This ontop of the other (crapyer) test where you basically play word association half the time, the whole enterprise of IQ testing fills me with doubt. I have no doubt I am "intelligent" enough to be somewhere near where I test on the bell curve, but 97th percentile feels way too high to me. I feel like a better test would be to present my with a piece of broken machinery I've never seen before and timing me while I try to fix it, only that's kinda hard to feed into numpy for pretty graphs.

Are the IQ tests used for actual funded trials different than what is used by starving students, are all of them shakey as hell buzzfeed affairs, or am I just biased against them for some reason?

I've always scored around 130

In the interest of calibrating my understanding of this, anecdotal experience by anecdotal experience, may I ask what score you received on the SAT?

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