BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


IQ testing

 
  

Page: 1(2)

 
 
daynah
02:50 / 17.09.05
to get me into the gifted program (for the non-Americans, that's the only way to be reasonably sure of getting a good education from the public/government schools),

Just gotta be a you-know-what and correct you on that note. Partly because this is what I'm devoting my life to and what not. Partly because all this thread is so far is everyone just nodding their heads in agreement, "Yup, IQ means very little, uh huh." and that's not fun.

The gifted program is not a better education system. It completely depends on what school system you're in. The one I was in, we actually had class in a bathroom. That's right, a large, handicapped bathroom with 8-10 kids and a teacher, chairs, and books in our laps.

The gifted program, on the other hand, is very good for gifted people. Point I'm trying to make is... Many people associate High IQ with giftedness, and that's the experience you went through. That's simply not true. Gifted does not mean smart. Gifted includes traits such as higher intelligence but also asynchonous development and hypersensitivity. So the person who always got an A in all your classes is not gifted, but just smart. Or just studied. The gifted child was probably the one who was incredibly mature at some times, immature at other times, got awful grades, but did perfect at standardized tests. Including the IQ test.

Unfortunately, many students who are not gifted get into the gifted program. Some gifted programs are actually made for smart kids, some for gifted kids, but few can handle both. But most people think...

"High IQ = Put them in a different classroom"

OR

"High IQ = Will never get along with peers, so we must FORCE them to get along with peers"

When really, high IQ has nothing to do with anything except with what Quantum said... IQ tests measure how good you are at IQ tests. They will not tell you whether you are like the girl at a near-by college who was in the Joint Enrollment program (go to college early) and went crazy, or whether you're like me and realise you never actually had friends until you were 16 and went on a college campus.

But an EQ test can't tell you that, either. A positive-negative scale can't tell you that. A 3D chart can't tell you that. I can't tell you that, your parents can't tell you that. Chances are you can't tell yourself that until you poke your toes into that water and have someone holding your hand to see if you can make it.

And, just so you know, I'm highly gifted and a member of Mensa. But I still can't get into the college of my choice. SAT 1480, GPA 3.4 no weighting 'cause my school system doesn't allow it, cannot get into the school I want.

And I've noticed something... it's the people with the low IQ who think IQs are important. And they generally lie about their IQs to make their arguement more acceptable: "Well, joe, I think we should kill everyone with a n IQ below 120." "Uh, but Bob... isn't your IQ-" "Shut up, Joe!"

But the people who actually have high IQs tend to be the ones who are on our side of things.
 
 
Quantum
09:03 / 17.09.05
It's a truism that MENSA is for people who are clever enough to complete the little puzzles they use to advertise, but not clever enough to realise it's a pointless club for self-congratulation. IQ is often a way (IMHO) for people to one-up others and claim as proof of how clever they are.
'Your argument is full of holes, dude.'
'But my IQ is 140 you're just too stupid to understand my mighty Brane so nyah!'


Daynah, it's intriguing to me how different the UK and US are around this issue, it seems the US places a much higher importance on Grade Point Average and IQ and other quantifiable measures (or at least that's what Brian in the Breakfast Club implies) than here in Blighty. There seems to be a technical use of the term 'gifted' there too I notice from your post.
 
 
daynah
12:29 / 17.09.05
The technical way of using of gifted is really only in the discourse community of gifted students, their parents, and the small bobbles of the education system that have been exposed to the studies.

Most of the time, parents use gifted as trying to say their kid is better than everyone else's when really their kid is just an idiot and, IQ aside, would probably convince a high majority of the population to agree with eugenics.

No, really, I'm of the believe that if you make most of western society, Americans at least, assistant teach school for 5-6 months, eugenics will become the biggest fad ever.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
19:09 / 21.09.05
One of my pals is applying to grad school in the US, and has to do standard tests beforehand -she says they're about the level you'd do at 15 / 16 at school. I'm interested if they're the kind of thing that would be called an IQ test in the US; it seemed to be a mixture of math(s) questions and verbal reasoning / comprehension / relationships of words to each other type questions. I've been reading this thread thinking of IQ tests as being those things where you have to state (for example) which shape comes next in sequence, and none of them seem to bear any relation to anything at all, but since her paper seemed a lot broader and a lot more based on things you could actually learn I'm intersted in whether I'm barking up the wrong tree with that idea...
 
 
grant
19:16 / 21.09.05
Those are standardized tests. They're similar to (and I think in some cases composed by the same people as) the major IQ tests, but are out-and-out testing your education level moreso than your problem-solving ability.
 
 
grant
19:23 / 21.09.05
The gifted program is not a better education system. It completely depends on what school system you're in. The one I was in, we actually had class in a bathroom. That's right, a large, handicapped bathroom with 8-10 kids and a teacher, chairs, and books in our laps.



Heh, that'd be a good metaphor for Florida's public education system as a whole -- I think we rank 49th in the nation. After Nevada.

It's nice that "gifted" can still mean "crazy creative" in a technical way. Around me (as a parent now, chatting with other parents), it really just means "decent teachers." I suppose that's really just a symptom of a system failure.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
20:34 / 21.09.05
Thanks grant -so in what kind of relations do IQ tests stand in relation to these standardised tests? in terms of college applications, streaming into different classes and so forth -do they contribute in equal measure to your GPA? I'm fascinated by all this, having spent almost my entire school career doing tests that were purely about revision...
 
 
astrojax69
23:42 / 21.09.05
quantum, to answer you on what my centre's tests are for, well, they are similar in structure from a participant's perspective, but the technique in evaluating the responses is what is novel; an information sciences-based approach [the second paper - 'creativity quotient' - here relates]

basically, the output is a multidimensional description of a person's creativity across its various components. ou technique also evaluates a participant's benefit gained from a break from the task. the director of the centre has also published on what he calls 'the a-ha! phenomenon', where the mind nonconsciouslyu continues to work on a problem while your conscious attention is seemingly elsewhere. this work on creativity is inter-related to the centre's work on the nonconscious processes of the brain/mind...
 
 
grant
13:58 / 22.09.05
Well, IQ tests really have nothing directly to do with college applications; I can't think offhand of a single college that uses a Stanford-Binet (IQ) score as an admissions criteria.

What they *are* used for (and as far as I know this is their primary use, besides things like psychological profiling) is as admissions into the above-mentioned gifted programs for elementary school. (Are there other uses of which I am unaware?)

This can be an important predictor of future success in getting into college -- and, I have to emphasize, the standardized tests that *are* used as admissions criteria for colleges are based on the same models and use the same structure as IQ tests. Their results also follow the same patterns along race and economic lines. But the tests are different, and are intended to measure different things.

Elaboration on standardized tests, probably only of interest to non-Americans:

SATs (the Scholastic Aptitude/Assessment Test, the most prevalent of the standardized tests) are divided into an English portion and a math portion, each worth 800 points. If I remember correctly, I nearly aced the English side, but wound up with a score in the 1200s because I suck at math. (I got into the undergraduate school I wanted because I wanted to go to a kind of freaky school, where the ability to write an essay outweighs GPA *and* SAT scores in their admissions criteria.)

To get into graduate school, you need a GRE (Graduate Record Examination), which has English, math and a logic portion. The logic portion is basically identical to an IQ test. (I did fairly well in English, aced the logic test, and got 200-something in the math side... 200 being the score you get just for putting your name on the paper. Freaky school=I've never taken a college-level math class.)

Our state also has something called the CLAST (College Level Aptitude and Skills Test) that you have to pass to get a degree. It's for second-year college students, and if memory serves is pretty basic. I can't even remember how they're scored.

More insidiously, elementary and high school kids in this state are now tested every two years with something called the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test). These are designed to see if the kids are performing "at grade level" (an arbitrary, bureaucratic measure). If not, not only are the kids held back, but the schools are graded -- those not performing well (the "D" and "F" schools) face massive budget cuts. School budgets depend on how well the kids perform on standardized tests, so teachers now teach to the tests, not to ordinary curricula. It's... well, I'm getting off topic and starting to rant, so I'll stop now. Thank you, Jeb Bush.

So, this is a lot of testing. When do we actually have time for school?
 
 
grant
14:09 / 22.09.05
Oh, I should clarify something about the GRE -- I'm using "English" loosely... it's actually a "communications" side. You can take sub-tests in various subject if you'd care to, or if your graduate program requires it. I took one in English, in which I didn't do as well as I'd hoped because it was all analyses of novels I'd never read. I didn't start reading African-American novels until two years later. If the questions had been about Japanese novels or, I don't know, Bible as literature or something, I would've done better. They're specifically subject-oriented to things you should know about if you've gotten a BA in that field (I wasn't an English major in undergrad, but wanted to go to an English dept as a grad student.)
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
12:53 / 23.09.05
Does anyone have any experience with gF/gC testing?

It's similar to IQ testing in that it purports to be an intelligence test, but usefully different in that the tests differentiate between fluid and crystallised intelligence (broadly, things like short term memory, series progression, simple arithmetic and 'reasoning' are fluid intelligence, and crystallised intelligence refers to things like long term memory, general knowledge, etc). The tests seem to be much less culturally biased, and look like the way of the future, but I'm biased as the university I attend laughs at IQ and worships at the feet of gF/gC.

It also tends to smooth out the radical bumps/drops in people's IQ scores over tests that use different modalities, if you seperate them out to this extent.

Last time I did individual differences stuff, though, there was talk of at least 16 subcategories of g, some of which were pulled out by factor analysis, and some by 'common sense'. Verbal, Auditory, visual, spatial, short term memory, LTM, empathetic, haptic/tactile (back to Wundt), etc. It's a little overwhelming, and over-precise (yet, at the same time, fails to capture so many nuances of people's abilities), so they generally simplify the model for testing purposes into gF/gC.

I just thought I'd throw this into the water and see if any of you sharks bite on it, as I'm interested to hear what sort of propagation this idea has outside of the few universities where it's being developed. I still think it's a crock of crap, but a much more useful one than "IQ".
 
 
grant
13:15 / 23.09.05
I've heard of g, but not gF/gC -- where's your school?
 
 
Quantum
14:49 / 23.09.05
Astrojax- thanks, esp. for the link. I'm going to have a read of some of that, it looks fascinating.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
22:38 / 23.09.05
I'm at the University of Sydney.

I'm about to go to work, but a good person to search for (from Sydney Uni) is Lazar Stankov, if you've got access to psychinfo, or google. A lot of his more recent work is about getting crazy as you get old, which is to be expected, since he's a crazy old guy, but there's a lot of Individual Differences/intelligence/etc stuff there too. Most of the age-related papers talk about the reduction in fluid intelligence as you age, also.

Probably a better person to read up on is Cattell, though, he originated the terms.

Tiny summary here.
 
 
alas
02:57 / 24.09.05
Nitpicking, here: Grant's discussion of the SAT & GRE (SATs (the Scholastic Aptitude/Assessment Test, the most prevalent of the standardized tests) are divided into an English portion and a math portion, each worth 800 points.) are--I hate to say it--a little dated. Both have been revised in the last two years. The SAT & the general GRE now both consist of three sections--Reading Comprehension, Quantitative skills and a Writing portion that includes an essay.

The verbal portion has been significantly revised--no more "angst::summer as pencil::universe" word games, which I always secretly loved....
 
 
alas
03:00 / 24.09.05
...Oh, and each section (of both tests) is now worth 800 points, so its now a 2400 scale.

This is probably very boring, but it's a big change to those of us used to the old 1600 scale. They are trying to make it more accurate because the SAT in particular has never actually been very good at predicting success in college--it is ok at predicting your first year grades, but that's about it. Lani Guinier argues that these tests are better at guessing your grandparents' income.
 
 
daynah
12:53 / 24.09.05
Lani Guinier can kiss my poor grandfather's butt.

The SAT is, in fact, a poor indicator of how one will do in college, but to say that it is an indicator of someone's wealth is a conspiricy cry from some whiney kid who didn't get the score, or pony, they wanted while a child.
 
 
alas
19:44 / 24.09.05
Guinier uses data and intelligent analyses to back up her arguments. I suggest you do the same. Here's a good summary of the wide array of studies that reach many of the same conclusions that Guinier does.

Many of Guinier's conclusions are based on the research of Crouse and Trusheim, who, the second (Elert) link explains,

conducted the most detailed statistical analysis of the SAT's predictive shortcomings. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study (NLS) of the high school class of 1972, they calculated the number of additional correct admissions using high school rank (HSR) alone and with the SAT. With four different measures of undergraduate success, they calculated that using the SAT in admissions adds between 0.1 and 2.7 additional correct forecasts per 100 applicants (see Table 1).

I.e., they found it's not statistically-significantly better at calculating correct admissions than random selection. And, if you read the entire article, it's even sometimes worse than random selections would be on predicting academic or career success.

What they found SAT did correlate fairly well to was family income and parents' professions:

If the SAT is an extremely weak predictor of academic potential it is a moderate predictor of family income. Average scores are proportional to family income: students from families with higher incomes tend to receive higher scores8. Estimates of the correlation between SAT score and family income vary from .23 to .40 (Crouse & Trusheim and Doermann, respectively). This ranking by income prevails not just when large groups are averaged together but also among applicants within the same institution.

A table from Crouse & Trusheim's book The Case Against the SAT (reprinted [on the Elert site linked above]) indicates that SAT scores differentiate people not only by income but also by their parents' role in the economic system. The average scores of the children of professionals are higher than the children of white collar workers, which in turn, are higher than the children of blue collar workers. High school rank, which is a better measure of academic achievement than SAT scores, shows no such correlation.

If SAT scores really measure a person's scholastic aptitude, then that aptitude is distributed according to parental income.

Some have used such studies to indicate the academic superiority of the upper classes. Further investigation reveals the folly of such assumptions. An American Council on Education study of 36,581 students in 55 colleges concluded that: "The income of a student's parents has no relationship to freshman GPA, either before of after controlling for high school grades, academic aptitude, and college selectivity" (Astin; 1971: 14).


This was, in fact, largely why the SAT had to be revised recently--even people at ETS (Educational Testing Services) eventually had to deal with what the data were showing. It will be interesting to see if the new SAT does do a better job of doing what it's supposedly good for. But, again, if you actually read these articles rather than simply denouncing conclusions based on some gut instinct of yours, you'll see that there are other modes of prediction that work fairly well and without discriminating on the bases of both income and race as the old SAT demonstrably did.
 
 
astrojax69
23:10 / 25.09.05
red frog, the centre for the mind is at u/syd, too... [though i am at anu] should check out the link to publications, above. be interested to know what you think...

what are you doing at u/syd?
 
 
grant
17:19 / 26.09.05
I hate to say it--a little dated.

I grow old, I grow old.

I think it's a good thing they're changing, though. Does your description mean there's not a logic part of the general GRE now?

I remember the essays, now, when I took the CLAST -- taking a risk by writing one about the meaninglessness of writing an essay for a standardized test. I'm still not sure how they "grade" the things and assign a single number (if they still do that). What if you've got great vocabulary, good sentence structure but abysmal overall structure? Or vice versa, what if you know how to create and back up a convincing thesis but kant spel to sav yur liff?

Didn't the ACT have an essay? Is it still in the running as an admissions tool?
 
 
alas
23:19 / 26.09.05
Just call me your US graduate/undergrad agony aunt--

Does your description mean there's not a logic part of the general GRE now?
Well, you can read all about it by following the links on the official ETS site, but, short answer, yep, no more questions like "Executives A, B, C, and D have cubicle spaces arranged in a square, but A cannot be next to C; while D must be next to C but . . . ." It's interesting, however, that there must be some early negative results to the test, because they're already "bragging" about improvements, and the "new and improved" points suggest by implication some of the flaws that needed correcting in the newest upgrade (and they explain the current structure in a few splashy bullets).

I'm still not sure how they "grade" the things and assign a single number (if they still do that). What if you've got great vocabulary, good sentence structure but abysmal overall structure? Or vice versa, what if you know how to create and back up a convincing thesis but kant spel to sav yur liff?

I know people who grade these kinds of tests. They are good people. But do I reallly think they can fully sort through such things? Not really. THey have to read many and fast in a single weekend.

Didn't the ACT have an essay? They never used to, but they now have an optional test.

Is it still in the running as an admissions tool? Yes. Most places will take either, although some require the SAT. Since no school that I know of, however, requires the ACT, the SAT is more popular. Most "savvy" kids (i.e., kids with hyperactive middle class parents or self-/media-imposed entrance anxiety) take both, multiple times.

My kids didn't bother with the ACT and only took the SAT once. I suspect they might have benefited from taking both. Spousal unit is very anti-testing; he works in a high school and is deeply distrustful of the supposedly "nonprofit" testing services. I suspect their administrators/boards are making a hell of a lot of money. So our kids did the bare minimum, and got into great schools. They're in a pretty rare situation, however.
 
 
alas
11:53 / 27.09.05
Here's an interesting essay arguing against the new standardized writing tests for college admissions. And some details on grading:

someone has to score the SAT essays—an estimated 2 million a year. In the test’s first iteration, the College Board commissioned Pearson Education to oversee scoring. Pearson hired high school and college writing teachers, paying them between $17 and $22 an hour. Scorers were trained through an instructional eight-hour CD-ROM. (I applied to be a scorer, but when I learned I’d be expected to score 220 essays in an eight-to-ten hour work day, or two to three minutes per essay, without breaks, and to agree to at least 30 hours of scoring a week, I balked.)

Scorers were encouraged to grade on the basis of the quality of examples students used to support their claims. The guidelines favor lengthy essays that use “SAT vocab” words and include elite cultural references. In the ScoreWrite pamphlet, for example, a top-scoring essay was lauded for using Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale “as an example of discontent motivating a society to make radical changes.” A low-scoring essay was faulted for weak critical thinking in its “appropriate but limited” example of Christopher Columbus. Essays that displayed an “impressive” vocabulary received higher scores. And though the College Board claims otherwise, longer essays generally received higher scores than shorter ones.
 
 
grant
14:57 / 10.10.05
A Virginia Tech study finds higher Emotional Intelligence correlates to success in information technology.

In other words, high EQ = better coder.

Methodology: More than 600 undergraduates at more than 20 institutions in the United States participated in the study, based on a series of questionnaires designed to measure coping strategies and emotional intelligence.

I really wonder, though, what a real EQ tool looks like. I've never been measured, and think those online ones are likely to be all screwy.
 
 
astrojax69
21:40 / 10.10.05
grant, this seems a little awry to me... the article at one point says:

The researchers found that although students' emotional intelligence was not directly linked to academic success, students with higher levels of emotional intelligence had more self-efficacy (self-confidence and knowledge that one can handle any problems or challenges effectively) -- and that having more self-efficacy in turn enhanced their academic performance.

so, does a raised eq score effect a positive outcome for academic performance, or not?

and while i agree that info tech courses should include broad social skills, this is because many info tech workers tend to be on the literal side of the equation, hedging towards the autism end of the social skills spectrum, which is counter to this study's claim, seemingly. am i missing something, or is this really an anomaly?

i must admit i have always been skeptical of eq tests too...
 
 
grant
16:45 / 11.10.05
am i missing something, or is this really an anomaly?


I'm not sure I follow you....
 
 
astrojax69
21:33 / 11.10.05
well, on one hand we have the thesis that 'geeks' have low level social skills (so presumably low level eq) but the thesis offered here seems to suggest that the best 'geeks' will have high eq scores...

which is it to be?
 
 
grant
16:21 / 12.10.05
I think you're stumbling over "self-efficacy," which seems to be a buzzword in social work (and other) circles nowadays. Self-efficacy doesn't relate to being a better geek, necessarily, but in using your innate geekness to make you a happier/more adaptive/more successful person.

A low-EQ, high-talent geek might be better at solving problems with your wireless network, but a middle-talent, high-EQ geek would be better at explaining the problem, setting up a wireless-fixing service and, if needed, pulling in favors from other people to get cheaper parts or consultations.

In my reading, at least.

That's why grades would only be an indirect measure. There's something about self-efficacy that I find bothersome as a scientific measure, because it's partially subjective, but that hasn't stopped social scientists from using it.
 
 
grant
17:54 / 10.12.07
Malcolm Gladwell (the Tipping Point guy) has an interesting take on what IQ tests really measure.

In a massively abridged form, it's the language of abstraction. That's a simplification. He gets into the Flynn Effect (why we're supposedly getting smarter every year) and the mechanisms behind racial differences in IQ test scores. Flynn calls in an ability to "wear scientific spectacles."

Here's one bit:

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
 
 
astrojax69
07:38 / 12.12.07
i was watching teev the other night and saw a report on monkeys doing memory tests more quickly and much more accurately than college students.

i immediately wrote to the professor i worked for at the centre for the mind thus:

so, temple [grandin] was right - animals are autistic, while the markers for human intelligence is the capacity to form concepts.


surely, intelligence tests should be monitoring and assessing this? what does anyone else think about this?
 
 
Closed for Business Time
08:52 / 12.12.07
Astrojax - do you have linky to where T Grandin talks about animals being autistic? Also, waddya mean when you say only humans can form concepts? It's a bit of a nebulous concept in cognitive science IME.
 
 
astrojax69
23:57 / 13.12.07
temple's discussion on animals being autistic is in her recent book, 'animals in translation'.

and what i mean about concept formation stems from my understanding of the work of allan snyder et al such as this article


basically, we all [sentient beings] suck in data about the world, raw sense data, but as the mind develops sophistication [intelligence] we use that data to manufacture concepts, but the evolutionary pay-off is losing [easy] access to the data, the details that go to make up a 'concept', and we then impose what we expect upon the world from our concepts of it. we see what we know, not what is 'out there'.

snyder's radical experiments with magnetic pulses to 'turn off' the frontal cortex has the effect of disinhibiting the data bits, giving us back some deeper access to details.

if you go to his centreforthemind.com by deleting the extension at the above article you'll find more. fascinating place to be - sad to have had to leave ;(
 
  

Page: 1(2)

 
  
Add Your Reply