While observing some of our incoming freshmen take "placement exams" yesterday, I was reminded of an academic study in which I participated back in the late 1990s. They wanted to compare IQ scores of perceived intelligent people given different test formats and different testing atmospheres. So I took I think 10 different tests over two weeks in different settings.
I ended up with an unusually high range of scores. They ranged from 111 to 155. Most of the tests concluded I was in the high 120s to mid 130s.
First a note on what these scores supposedly mean. According to most scoring models, the scores designed to measure what percentile of the overall population you are more intelligent than. A score of 100 is average. A 111 puts me at smarter than about 75% of the population. A 155 places me smarter than 99.9% of the population. There is quite a difference between those two numbers. According to one I am smart enough to survive college and according to the other I am a genius.
So, how did I end up with such a wide range of scores? There were three variations in the tests that impacted me in particular: time, distraction, and spacial reasoning. I did much better in untimed tests than timed ones. I did much better when there was little distraction than when there was a lot. Finally, I have a really low spacial reasoning iq.
My 111 score involved a timed test, with a large spatial reasoning component, and there were children playing loudly outside the window. My 155 score was an untimed test with no spatial reasoning component and a soft piano concerto playing in the background. Arguably, neither of those scenarios are good measures of my working intelligence. While I would like to do all of my thinking without time pressures and having classical piano in the background, that isn't real life.
The reason I talk about this is that admission to gifted programs in school are frequently tied to iq tests. I didn't get into the gifted program in elementary school, in spite of being widely recognized as the smartest kid in my class. My sister was admitted, and she will be the first to tell you that I have a much higher iq than her (although she more than crushes me with eq).
The accuracy and legitimacy of iq tests worry me, especially for aspies. It is my impression (which may be wrong) that aspies have "specialized intelligence". We tend to be exceptional at some things and bad at others, even if they are somewhat related. Immanuel Kant, for example, was probably an aspie (he's been dead for a while, but based on everything I've read about him, he fits every criteria). He was arguably one of the greatest philosophers in world history. Yet, in spite of his clear genius, there were certain fields of study he just could not do. I wonder what his iq score would have been when he was 9 years old. Would Kant have been "tracked" with the average or below average kids? (I was until about 4th grade.) How much genius are we missing because we don't really know how to measure this type of specialized intelligence?
I'm not sure if there is a point to all this rambling. It's just something I've been thinking about the last couple days. If you can figure out the point to my rambling, please comment so as to help other readers and myself.
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